The Last Sleep
by ninety6tears
Summary: AU: When Bella's future is abruptly altered by brutal circumstances, she seeks comfort in an impossible balance between her life with Edward and a restrained relationship with Jacob.
1. Prologue

No one knew that Bella was in the woods.

It had started with the slamming of a screen door, Bella's frustration with Charlie brimming into some uncharacteristically loud frustration, boots squeaking in their bothersome chippers against the wood. Coming home, she'd practically smelled the argument brewing when Charlie had commented on Edward's absence being an exception to the rule, like he was noting it as an opportunity. Just past dusk she was three knife chops into a carrot when her frustration from one of her father's irritatingly passive-aggressive comments about "that Cullen kid" had made the knife slip into her finger. With the flicking hand motions of the immediate stinging, she'd peeled out one cutting remark and knew then that it was starting.

"Honestly, Bells, are we just going to pretend that the last several months—what he did to you—that none of that happened? That I didn't have to watch that happen to my daughter?"

"That would be_ fantastic_."

Then he tried to mention her best friend. The name had barely made it out of Charlie's mouth before she'd stiffened in resistance to the pain of the subject, snapping back, "That's not fair. _He_ won't talk to me, he doesn't call—And you know that."

"It's all the more reason I'm worried. What's his big grudge against the Cullens? He never seemed to buy into Billy's stories, it can't be that—"

"So you trust his opinion over mine!?..." This next part would feel like such a waste of words, a demonstrative lie: "What if I told you I was going to marry Edward, Dad? Would you maybe try to get used to him then?"

"_Are_ you?"

It hadn't been the truth, but it had seemed like the best example for laying it out to him. She feebly replied, in a tone sounding like a question. "...Yes. Eventually."

"Oh, this isn't like you. What, is he_ pressuring_ you? Why in God's name are you thinking about getting married already?"

"He's not..." Her voice had started weakening with watery anger, at him and herself, for all the impossibility of honesty. "He's not like you think."

"Bells—"

"You're not _listening_ to me..." She'd just thought, _Dammit_, maybe even said it out loud, and stomped into her rain boots while her father tried to reason with her, his words blurring together and never reaching her. She couldn't know about the last thing he'd said because she was going out the front door into the spitting spring rain outside, and then she'd taken a good distance by storm until she was somewhere far into the woods, probably somewhere close to the blind path she'd wandered morosely that other time.

She was messed up about that too, today. Her mood was scorching up the wire, and she couldn't quite tell why, couldn't calm herself down. Accompanied with the drowning of her senses into the dripping rain and endless trees, her stress catapulted into a bottomless apathy, and she hardly cared about the fact that she was probably going to end up lost.

So, as it happened, she was angry when it came. Her blood was rapid and charging, the very sweetness and the scent becoming some whole other beckoning invisible red ghost.

In the damp cold of that deep May night in Forks, exactly a month before she was to graduate from high school, Isabella Swan was found in the darkness of the forest by a strange man named Ivan. His eyes were red as cherries.

She saw the details immediately when he approached her: the stance, the leisurely walk of a moment that was only the blink of one night amidst a century. The paleness of the skin when it came into view, and the obvious hunger under the brows; the fact seemed to reveal itself rather slowly, suspended and clutching onto every stitch of realization in the half-minute before he appeared fully to her, and then flashed her an inviting sentence of a smile.

Hatred moved in her helplessly, a drowning emotion packaged pointlessly through the sudden adrenaline. She could tell the difference by now, and suddenly was seized as if in realization that the evil had no end. They were perhaps not everywhere in the world but still always anywhere, and so very few were like the ones she knew. She could tell exactly what kind he was.

She acted before the shock of her sudden and viciously ironic plight could overtake her, and spoke. Her voice came out shaky, immediate.

"My blood wouldn't be very good for you."

The tall inhuman man had brown hair, with a general slight and starved appearance that made his obvious strength somewhat mocking. He wore a honey-colored shirt that lent a soft glow to the snow of his skin. He lived up to the unimaginable beauty as well as the terrifying confidence of so many vampires Bella had met before, and on all the occasions that Bella had been just a flashing movement away from the fatal hunger, she had trembled and only managed to protest weakly for her life. This night, though, Bella was not only shaking but bridled by genuine fury that seemed heightened by a refusal to accept the genuine danger; She thought in a rapid daze: Death or life, how long would such an event take to settle into Alice's mind? Could she have already seen Bella standing in the woods in such obvious danger? Surely they would be looking for her already?

And just maybe, the wolves...

She would have to stall him for as long as she could.

This may not be very difficult, considering the bemused expression he had on his face at her comment. He was even too astonished to speak at first, but seemed to hardly doubt that he had the upper hand. He blinked, and smiled.

"You know what I am?"

"Yes," Bella replied. Her voice was not without obvious fear, but defiant.

He tilted his head in curiosity, and she knew he would at least entertain her protests in light of this interesting information. "But how can that be?—Would you like to sit for a while?"

"I'd prefer to stand at my own funeral."

He laughed in loud, genuine amusement, a sort of musical echoing bark like a bobcat yawning. "I see, I see...Really, you are kind of endearing. May I ask your name?"

She made a point not to look around, not to look like she was thinking about breaking a run for it, because she knew better, and she wanted him to know she knew better. Even with her knowledge of the fact that any escape without help was completely impossible, the instinctive and powerful urge to flee was still nipping at the back of her mind. But she looked the man right in the face and replied, "Bella."

"Ah." He bowed his head. "My name is Ivan. And can I say that I'm surprised—"

"You should listen. You realize the company I keep would be very unhappy if you hurt me, don't you?"

"...Right—So you have managed to _befriend _a few? You realize that's quite rare..."

"There isn't much I don't know about vampires," Bella interrupted. "Anything I don't know I plan on finding out eventually."

Ivan, finally seeming to consider some hesitance with her, nonchalantly stepped aside to lean against a tree. "You mean that they want to..."

"Yes."

Seeming slightly surprised by this situation, but all the while certainly amused, Ivan seemed to weigh a variety of thoughts pertaining to both the astonishment and inconvenience of the situation. As his thoughts thickened, Bella tried to figure out how many minutes had passed, as well as a flimsy estimate of how long it could take her vampires to get to her, assuming, of course, that they knew she was in danger. Her frantically muddled thoughts could not begin to speculate whether they'd first go searching through all the forests in Forks at top speed, or if they'd race to her house to follow her scent from there. Edward's average from her house to his was four minutes, and then maybe it was one or two more minutes to where she stood from there; and considering the urgency...

Her thoughts were interrupted by Ivan laughing again, seeming very light-spirited about the situation at hand. "This is very, very strange. Kind of a fine entertainment. Look, enlighten me: Why?"

Bella swallowed. "Why...Do I want to..."

He nodded.

His curiosity was going to save her life; she had no room to feel that any question was too personal. She swallowed, trying to calm the detectable racing of her heart. "I'm in love with one."

Rather than showing a particular amount of surprise, Ivan seemed to consider her answer for a while and resolve that it made sense. She decided in that anxious pause to ask him a question, which felt strangely like she was actually trying to stimulate conversation. "I'm sure you're just passing through Forks?"

"Of course," he replied, smiling as if this really was a polite meeting. "And I was surprised to catch the scent of so many others, here and there. So far I've distinguished five...It's particularly strong in the woods, and near the school. I thought it was very curious. Are they all a _family_?"

"Yes," Bella spoke solidly, but with her hands wringing together, allowing a pause so that her ears could pick up any sign of approach. There was nothing but the quiet slaps of rain, branches creaking against each other. "The Cullens. You haven't heard of them?"

"I have not." His amused face brightened at the promise of this gossip. "Though I'm sure they are talked about—a clan of that size? I've never even..."

So Bella explained that there were actually seven, and told him all of their names, all the guises and occupations they put on so that they could live among people. She left out details of any of their gifts, but mentioned that Carlisle was well-acquainted with the Volturri, which seemed to interest him. He seemed quietly pleased with any information she could give him, so she wavered on, attempting to bury her fear under the countenance of one who was granting privileged information. This seemed capable of charming him, but she weakened. In every second that no one saved her, her nerves continued to slowly decompose. When her bravery snagged in her throat and she could hardly say anything more, her arms crossed over her chest protectively, and as if sick to her stomach, she weakly walked over to a large log Ivan had previously invited her to sit on, and lowered herself onto it, waiting.

He was eyeing her curiously, obviously not understanding why her fear would escalate over the minutes, perhaps having concluded that her previous confidence was merely utter stupidity. When her shivering glance met his eyes, she realized there was a good amount of cold wetness streaming down her cheeks.

How long. How long had she been in the woods with this monster. _Edward. Where are you?_

She looked away from Ivan as he sat down next to her. After a brief moment, he produced a square of paisley cloth from a pocket and held it out to her. In a kind of senseless automatic reaction, she took it with her hand but could only hold it on her knee, clenching it so tightly that her knuckles paled.

"Hmm. I'm guessing you realize now that as long as I burn your remains and cover my tracks well enough..." Of course she'd heard that before, in the woods from someone like him...

She was closer to sobbing now, a faint wail escaping from her chest. When she replied, her voice was hateful and strangled.

"Act like a gentleman, would you."

He chuckled.

The rain was stopping.

"He's going to tear you apart," Bella choked out. "He'll find out—he'll find you..._Someone_ will find out..."

Ivan relished her desperation with a smirk. "And why are you so sure?"

Bella's arms tightened in their shaking restraint as he reached his hand over and rested it lightly on hers.

She glared down at his white fingers. "I guess you could say I have friends in strange places."

Instead of laughing at her, he pressed his lips together and examined her badly covered horror with genuine interest. After a moment he said quietly, "You are a fascinating young woman, Bella. I'm quite happy we met. I don't think you'll understand this, but it should give me a unique kind of pleasure in taking your life."

Then Bella gasped, not out of a heightened fear from what Ivan was just saying, but in realization; at lightning speed, her mind, dwindling frightfully into the corner of the imagination that impossibly attempts to grasp the experience of death, the concept of blackness, of perpetual ignorance and thoughtlessness, had made her realize in one flinching shock why Alice did not know that she was about to be killed.

Ivan was disinterested in immediately restraining her when her whole body flicked up: she jumped off the log and ran forward a few steps, and she began screaming a name she had not mentioned to him; calling for a man, an other creature.

The wind seemed to pick up as the cold hand clenched fiercely around Bella's wrist.

It broke.


	2. One

_I expected my skin and my blood_

_to ripen, not be ripped from my bones;_

_like fallen fruit, I am peeled, tasted,_

_discarded. My seeds open_

_and have no future._

-Wendy Rose

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He heard his name being called—_screamed _—and it was close enough to be his own voice, too close to what he'd been looking for.

His monstrous paws darted into the clearing, and halted.

Her eyes met his and he saw it in her expression before he saw how that fiend, its smell stinging and vile, had its teeth locked on her, just around the soft bone at the point of her shoulder. Her blood was spilled all over her clothes, and in one sharp flicker of a millisecond, Jacob was reminded of the fear of another day: the clouds churning angrily through the skies, water spilling from their sopping hair, the discoloring beach, and the way her shirt, wet, clung lovingly to the bones of her shoulders as he beat the death out of her lungs, again and again, praying for her eyes to meet his.

The thought burned like a bat to the head and Jacob's head was filled with fury; the rest were coming from the side, but he didn't wait. He charged forward and ripped it away from her, teeth gnashing and claws cracking, a thunderous roar chilling even the four others who came into the gap and saw the two fierce figures disappear through the trees, one already seeming victorious in the weight and speed of violent loathing.

They took her to Jacob's house.

Soon enough Bella's best friend came running into his yard and there was Leah on the little porch with a cigarette, which she dropped in a fumble, and her eyes widened almost fearfully as if she'd heard a banging sound when she saw Jacob's face.

He bolted through the front door and he heard her screaming before he hurried with a sickened look into the next room to see all the tall boys surrounding the girl, every one wearing an expression of near-nauseated unease.

She seemed incapable of opening her eyes or even reacting to anything but the pain; he'd never asked her about it and he had no idea it was supposed to hurt this bad. Her face winced in whimpers between the almost-constant screams of what was surely the worst burning she'd ever been in; Jacob could have never imagined her like this, her nerves so completely crushed...

"Bells," he choked. The others moved quickly to let him through, and he was down on his knees, reaching for her hand...

As if it scalded him to touch her, his hand flicked quickly away: her hand was already shockingly cool.

Jacob's mind felt around in desperation, until he remembered. Her scar...

"Wait, wait, wait, wait," Jacob yelled shakily, "It just happened, maybe we can do something—She told me before she'd gotten bitten, and he just sucked the venom out..."

He had her lifted up against him, but there were several exclamations at his blundering madness and somebody was already grabbing him strongly at the shoulders and pulling him back.

"Are you _crazy_, you'd die before it did any good—"

Embry tightly held him back until Sam, tightly reasoning, said to Jacob, "It's too late. Can't you see she's bitten all over? Both her legs..."

For a moment Jacob looked at her, biting his lip until the tears started running hot down his face.

As Billy Black came slowly forward out of the corner, Jacob seemed to notice for the first time that his father was in the room. He just grimaced and moaned, "Dad..."

Billy's face was so vacant, it looked like he was only tiredly heading over to look out the window for a while before heading to bed; and he did stop next to the couch and glance out the window as if there wasn't a girl twisting around in excruciating pain, her heels recoiling sharply into the couch like she was trying to bury herself into its torn spaces.

But his hand seemed to act on its own accord, and his fingers twisted through a tangled mess of her hair that was hanging off over the armrest, lingering for one moment, and then letting it escape from him like air.

He had to be thinking, Not Charlie's girl. But to everyone who saw the tall tensing boy get up, cringing into the far wall like he couldn't stand to watch anymore, this was the end of Jacob's girl, the silencing of a favorite sound, loss of hearing, loss of sight.

After a long moment it was Paul, his eyes watching Bella's agony with pity and disgust, who said, "We ought to kill her."

Jacob didn't flinch; the rest were frozen in anticipation of what he would say.

Paul reasoned, but seemed almost afraid of speaking. "It's our job, isn't it? Newborns are the most dangerous. Either way. She can't be here when she's..."

A few pairs of eyes looked to Sam, whose face looked deeply troubled, but the most measuring of the whole group.

After a moment of consideration, he just said, "Jacob..."

From where he stood with his body buried against the wall, still not daring to look over at Bella, Jacob closed his eyes, his breath heaving for a long moment. For a minute all that was heard was Bella's helplessly dwindling whimpers, and Jacob seemed to speak just to shut that out when it simply became too much. His eyes were as decisive as they could manage as his gaze turned over to Sam, but they all knew there was really only one choice.

"Take her to them."

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When Sam, alone, appeared at the Cullen house carrying Bella's writhing, ripening body out of his Toyota and up to their porch, the reactions were speechless. There was no confusion as to what was happening to her.

Edward Cullen, his composure shaken, looked at his sister. "Why didn't you...?"

Alice was the least able to quite grasp the tragedy but nonetheless looked unquestionably unsettled, and said nothing. But Rosalie, her expression pained, sinister, and more fierce than any of the wolves had ever seen, glanced acidly at Sam, and grated, "Because of _them_."

"We had a rogue in the forest," Sam explained. "Only some thirty minutes after we first caught scent of it...Well, Bella just happened to be in the clearing. If no one had found her at that very moment..."

By now the entire family, examining Bella's cringing form with shock, shared the same look of amazement. There was a foreboding feeling, like a burning odor in the air; everyone understood quite numbly that this was tragic and terrible, but the very reason why was lingering somewhere, snickering wickedly from Bella's chilling wails.

"The one that attacked Bella..." Sam's voice was now tightening, quavering, "He wasn't alone. That's why we got thrown off looking for the first scent we caught...The other, we found closer to the border of the forest. She..."

"_No_—!" Edward now heard it in Sam's carefully controlled thoughts, and his face contorted in misery as he practically fell against the white banister on the porch. The rest waited fearfully for Sam to finish.

Sam had lost his composure at Edward's outburst, but the rest were waiting fearfully for him to finish. He pressed his knuckle to his mouth, then forcibly brought it back down. "Her dad came looking for her. She killed him. Charlie Swan's dead."

Emmett cursed. Alice buried her face into Jasper's chest.

With a tense, guarded look, Carlisle came forward and took Bella into his arms, carrying her quickly into the house. Esme watched her with heavy silence.

Sam then answered the question smoldering in Edward's eyes. "Jacob destroyed the one that got Bella. Tonight we will burn the remains of both of them close to the border."

That was all for Edward, who turned out of his tense stance to go after Carlisle, after Bella.

The rest—his sisters, brothers, and Esme—exchanged looks of desolate expectation, and then turned away from the last they'd ever see of Sam Uley, and went into the house, shutting the door behind them.

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There is an at times romantic but also disastrous human tendency to assign destiny to coincidence. For someone immortal, someone who will see the chance occurrences of not just one but many lifetimes, this tendency is only flirted with in occasional fancy. After many occasions of just barely possible circumstance, a person granted with eternal life, after a time, could casually monitor and perhaps even calculate the probability or frequency of that one-in-a-million, that chance meeting of two long parted, or a certain beautiful type of snow.

But Bella's circumstance was somehow unavoidably eerie, strangely astonishing to every single one of the Cullens. Bella would come upon her new existence, and recoil, falling victim to the mortal assumption that she had been sentenced, punished.

It was because of this profound shred of her past nature that Bella sought no peace with her new one. It was because of this she could not fully change.

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Bella opened her eyes and knew it was the last time she'd ever wake up; it was a strange thing, like what it would be like to fitfully fall asleep, to furiously lie still.

The first thing her eyes focused on was the reflection of herself in the great glass window at the back of the Cullen house. Her mouth fell slightly open and quivered like she was afraid of that perfection in the mirror, calling itself her self. Someone was running a comforting hand over her head; in the reflection, she saw Rosalie with the deepest look of defeat and grief. The strangeness of that affection was horrible, and Bella had to stand up and get a better look. She immediately felt the speed of her reborn body, the lightness of her awesome strength as she moved to stand and glance over into the window. She gasped slightly, and then her breath drew more deeply at the astonishment of that empty action, the air pushing bothersomely into her inconsequential lungs.

She gaped at herself in the glass, never imagining she would be this beautiful; closer to the door of the bedroom, Alice gave a tentative look.

And then Bella realized, and realized. As surely as her feet were on the floor, this was not a dream, and this was an after to the before: A door slamming, twigs flitting by her angry body in the dimness of the woods, and a creature.

"Charlie..."

Edward's hand had closed firmly around her wrist before she could make it to the door, a sad first of being able to touch her so strongly. She felt his voice at her ear, sounding more tortured than he'd ever sounded before, with her hearing ripped raw and anew.

As it was whispered, the newness of Bella's skin became heavier, still and cold: she felt as if she had been freezing solid for a hundred years, now anciently sharp, fossilized. Instantly, one hand felt for another wrist. Without looking down, she could feel that her bracelet was gone.

She felt she would surely tumble as she limped—but then glided like a ghost—back over to the window. Her alarmingly white hand came up to cover her face, stopping stuck in paralyzed disbelief over her mouth.

They could see that her eyes, looking like translucent hard candies, held more than the sadness for Charlie and her mother's grief. Where human eyes would seem in a daydream, hers seemed fixed and searching, farther away than any of them could see. She would begin to always do this, to look outside of the windows to the impossible depth, the swallowing trees.

That evening being the first night she would have to occupy herself instead of having her vividly telling dreams, she sat in the window and listened. From the haze of afar she heard the agonized pitches of not just one but several wolves howling; her arms jolted with the reminder, her fingers tensing as if she was still in pain, still transforming. Edward had been watching her, anxiously helpless, and his expression became pleading as she reacted just the same as ever to the pain of someone who was more than miles—some life—away now.

In a gasping moan, she whispered, "I can't..."

But there was no can or cannot; nothing to be done or not done or undone or redone. There was only existence and an always tasting far less sweet than she'd expected; it now seemed less like living, less like being, when coupled with the impossibility of doing anything else.


	3. Two

_Author's Note: __I should explain that I started writing this fic while I was reading Eclipse and had all of it planned before Breaking Dawn was released, and I did not change anything to conform to the BD canon of Bella's abilities. Generally speaking, if you thought Breaking Dawn tied up everything quite nicely, chances are this fic isn't for you. Though it wasn't written to that purpose, this fic is more of an alternative to the convenient fantasy that is Breaking Dawn. If you want a happy or hopeful ending, you may get it, but it depends on how you view things._

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Bella wouldn't hunt. Not wanting to acknowledge that she felt like killing for the taste, she stayed at the house, and stayed at the house. She knew she wanted human blood without yet knowing what they would smell like to her now; the thought of it made her venom thicken in her mouth. When she couldn't stand it anymore she killed a fox, wincing at how easy it was. She knew what her hands could do, what they were capable of crushing into sand with the slightest effort. When she walked she barely felt her feet hit the ground, a sensation that would have made her dizzy if her head wasn't calm and steady like a brick all the time, at least in the physical sense.

Emotions affected her body in a way she wasn't used to. Her head never swam and her heart never raced, but pain seemed to shock the air around her into a freezing, disorienting smoke. She was disconnected and drowning out of her skin; her sensations made no sense to her. She should feel more solid than this. She should feel like nothing could break her.

She could think of everything at once. She couldn't stand to think of anything.

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In her soft humanity, every touch from Edward had caressed her to him, eager and aching and blushing like any woman; but in her strange body she fumbled with a virginal innocence, and her legs tucked up to shyly hide her naked body. As she sat curled and burrowed on the bed in Edward's room, his voice was soft and reassuring in her ear. He smelled different to her now. The scent was the same, but somehow its elements were distinguishable from each other rather than mingled into their former irresistible mystery.

Bella got under the blankets that still smelled a little bit like her old body in the bed that they no longer needed but didn't get rid of. In the darkness of the room she held Edward's hand and stared into nothing, feeling the sameness of their skin wash over her, wishing she could suspend this: her beauty and her strength and Edward so close to her body, everything she wanted mockingly granted by this harsh robbery. She craved the very desire of it now that it was forever fulfilled. She wished her muted and crackled thoughts could want something other than to rip the throats off of animals and condemn their blood to her body.

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Even though the family of course did not sleep, they all maintained a habit of solitude at night. She remembered Edward telling her about the long walks he used to take before her little bedroom became his nighttime retreat. Her capacity for patience seemed to have already adjusted to immortality; she was more or less incapable of being restless.

Bella had a thin white gown, more like a night slip, that she wore in the house a lot of the time, not feeling much need to look presentable. Unfeeling to the cold, she was wearing only this, a thin layer of delicate cotton next to her chilled white-ribbon skin as she sat with her legs crossed in the middle of the vast field behind the Cullen house.

She had a book open on her lap. Her sharp eyes would have no problem reading it in the darkness of the field, but she had not looked at one word. She sat up lithe and straight, oddly graceful even in just sitting still, even as her body shouldered the grave burden that kept her eyes fixed forward. Looking at nothing in particular, she weighed the sickness of her existence against all the reasons she had wanted this before.

The tall green grass blew in the wind, its mournful expanse around all sides punctuating her solitude. Still and pained, Bella's thoughts sought for one comfort, the thing her mind had been seeking in its endless remorse: a memory, just one, in which she'd decided that she wasn't sure, that she needed more time.

In the house on top of the piano, the first article about the missing eighteen-year-old and her father had been ripped thin out of the newspaper and set there, accompanied two months later by the announcement of their memorial services. Another month had passed as invisibly as dust, and every morning Bella would approach the piano and her fingers would brush in a tremor over the newsprint. She had not yet managed to read them, to see the quipped, abridged accounts of her family's grief. It was strange, and it made her feel stupid, to see her own name in a newspaper; sooner or later, her name would have had to be in the paper, sooner or later when she and Edward had finally packed up their lives for Alaska. It was like she'd always imagined she'd be writing the story herself, and that it would be the same as reading about a strange person disappearing in another town, to confront the disaster she'd constructed for the disposal of her unwanted life.

But when Alice had first returned from the convenience store with the newspaper to hesitantly show it to Bella, it wasn't as simple as knowing that the news was wrong, that it was all a deception; when she saw her own senior yearbook picture as well as one of Charlie's police portraits sitting sadly next to the tragic headlines, it felt like a heavy and solid truth: Isabella Swan was dead. They were both dead.

She had been so stubborn about what she'd wanted, and surely, though, she'd had some fear? If Edward had one day kissed his way from her cheek, to her jaw, to her throat, and then nuzzled his teeth around her neck, she would have hesitated?

Surely she would have realized, going home to cook dinner for Charlie that night, that there would never have been a way to truly say goodbye.

The moon was brimming from behind the clouds like white, mean fire, and Bella longed for movement, some kind of change.

It was like sleepwalking, as close as she could ever get: Her body was alert and awake, but something jostled her hard metal bones, and before she knew what she was doing, she felt the wind on her face and knew that she was running.

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It was like the forest found her, rather than the other way around. Standing off the edge of the potholed road, she found her bare feet halted just outside the swallowing dark expanse of trees in an area now forbidden to her. Even though she'd passed through a few green fields and the rough breeze to get here, something still felt more wild and wistful and dangerous directly over the boundary of where she stood. Beyond the border the air seemed electrifying, teeming with the movements of every animal; she could smell it all rustling like a pulse. There was even a whiff of saltier, lighter air coming from farther west. The beach. The movements of the branches and the lifting of the leaves arguing loudly, the wind forbidding and beckoning with its slight mystery, all the secrets she was never told; she longed to let it get the best of her.

Her still arms sensed the tickle of her gown blowing slightly over her skin, her bare legs feeling the tease but not the temperature of the icy breeze. She inhaled a rich sample of the wind, letting her eyes close for half a moment.

Then her elegant white foot stepped over the border into the La Push woods.

Everything moved as before while her ghostly figure drifted slowly through the woods, her graceful steps landing noiselessly over sticks and roots, but it seemed to her that something would snap at any moment. She was not wary. It was more like she was waiting.

She walked rather slowly; for her it should have felt like she was hardly moving at all, but with the heaviness of her heart Bella had not yet explored her body's full potential for inhuman speed. After some long moments, maybe almost an hour, she knew she was rather deep into the woods. She stopped for a moment and relished the certainty that she had never been in this exact place before, filled with the weird thrill that what she was doing was wrong.

She caught the scent of something some fifty yards away: a big animal, possibly a deer. She hadn't realized how hungry she was. With a dull ease of movement, she found and snatched a rabbit off the ground, snapping its neck and beginning to drink the sour blood in one bite, tasting an orange hue to the red she thirsted for.

It should have looked ungraceful, her shoulders stooped with raw indulgence as her neck bent in for purchase of the limp dead creature, but the gown and her skin were the same translucent, ethereal white, and her hair billowed with an impossibly graceful mind of its own, licking at the smallest currents of the wind. She was vicious and angelic, stripped to lightning, and that was how he found her.

Her head turned and her hands slowly let the hare drop to the ground as a patch of darkness seemed to shift, revealing itself as the massive wolf body appearing through a tangle of branches, romping slowly towards her; she lifted an arm to wipe the thin trickle of blood from under her mouth, and a sliver of moonlight caught over her eyes just as the poison-apple color in them was fading to a warmer crimson.

With the same hazy slowness that had brought her into the forest, she went to him, stopping a couple yards away to marvel, still as a statue, sensing that the familiar eyes were taking in the sight of her with pained amazement.

Her old friend had once feared that she would be afraid of this creature he could be, that it would disgust her that he could take the form of an enormous and dangerous thing; always, when she knew that he was good, her fascination had outweighed her fear. Even now, standing so close and feeling herself tense with a kind of furious awe at this body that she knew was made to destroy her, her heart felt humbled. The warm and terrible beast, as brutal as it would be to her now, was still one of the most beautiful things she thought she would ever see.

So with the weight of that being true even in her now very long life, she looked for the longest of moments before she noticed that the wolf was trembling, its russet fur shivering, reminding her of his hands, and there was no going back. With thick apprehension, not knowing if he simply ached to rip her body in half, she slowly reached out her hands and went forward until her arms were buried around one giant leg. Her face pressed longingly into the fur, feeling the overwhelming warmth of the fuming animal, a fireside to her permanently thawed body.

"Oh, Jake." She sighed quietly, her voice sweet and sadder than any other sound he'd ever heard. "You smell awful."

Jacob Black toppled out of himself, the transformation knocking him to his knees where his head was lowered weakly, as if in surrender. His breath heaved to the grass, his shoulders making choking motions, until her white hand found his dark hair; he then pulled her down to his lap and, slowly and sadly, cradled her against him.

She could not cry, but her white body seemed to sob all over. A sound came out of Jacob's throat like a sigh shaking off a growl, and then his voice was muttering to her silent anguish, the familiar deep hum of it just as she remembered.

"Shush. Bells...It's alright."

Jacob wept silently for both of them as she clung, mutely, into his warmth.

.

.

.

.

Other times after that were less easy; after being away from each other for a couple days they'd have to get accustomed to the repelling flavors all over again. Their senses tricked them into thinking they were strangers until they would realize, no, there is a trace of him in there, of her. You.

A couple nights later they found each other almost timidly, Bella crossing her arms over her shirt as Jacob came out from behind a tree buttoning his pants. As his hands fumbled, Bella noticed something dangling from his right wrist...

He saw it catch her eye and said, "I told you I had it. I had to repair the chain first..."

He'd found her bracelet somewhere between his front door and his couch on that first morning after. It must have caught onto something and snapped off. She thought she could remember being there, some scattered and bruised impressions of unrecognizably strangled voices. She didn't try to remember the pain.

They were sobered up by the seemingly loud and flat sound of each other's voices, and fell quiet, looking at each other with some nine feet of space between them. Finally, Bella seriously asked, "Why did you put it on?"

They both knew why. They had to fool themselves into getting close to each other now. He'd hoped for just a touch on the wrist, and he needed a reason to let her. And she thought how this was so pathetic, but when she went a few steps toward him, her senses became invaded by that otherness in his blood. Not just the smell that the Cullens had always described but the total tensing feeling that his whole body was offensive, threatening, vile sick trash. Since first experiencing its shocking affliction through her emotional weakness the first time they'd come together in the woods, it was too easy to forget what it was like when away from it.

And it was only fair for this inconvenient instinct to fool her again and again into feeling like Jacob wasn't Jacob anymore. She knew it was the same for him, as false but as impossible to not feel.

It was an odd effort, to slip the chain onto his wrist, probably out of his pocket right after he'd unphased; of course she'd notice, and she didn't need to wait for him to answer. As he kind of sheepishly unclasped it, she took a few quick steps towards him and held out her arm, hand closed.

In a slow but eager way, one side of his mouth smiling with relief, Jacob linked the bracelet around her wrist, and his long dark fingers fumbled until the clasp was fastened.

He started to pull back, but Bella grabbed his wrist, and for a moment they both stood still while she seemed to steel herself. Then, gradually, she stepped forward until she was steadied against him.

His arms wavered for a short moment, and then wrapped around her, and held tighter and tighter until it was that bear hug that used to push the air from under her ribs, this time lasting longer than ever because she didn't have to breathe. The moments happened in a profoundly slow way that would've formerly seemed awkward, a little too tender. But Bella needed to be touched even by him, and their now opposing selves therefore insisted on a relationship that oscillated abruptly between the most physically intimate of friendships and a distant tolerance.

Later they sat next to a very narrow stream that was slightly inscrutable from a few yards away. With both their legs hanging over the water, Jacob's long ankles allowed his bare feet to skim into the water. It was cool outside and Bella, thinking that the water must be like ice, was vividly reminded of Jacob's natural warmth by that small thing, remembering the way she would sometimes inch closer to his body on cold nights by the ocean. Even though it wasn't that long ago, it felt a lifetime away that she had been capable of being bothered by the cold; even though she could still feel temperature, could feel his skin pleasant and scorching when they managed even to touch anymore, the strong sense of need rather than want for it was gone now.

Just like making love to Edward, when it eventually happened, would occur out of some decided gestures rather than the involuntary quickening of a pulse. There had been a time of her human life when her mind and heart had stunted her into feeling so indifferent about experiencing anything, but now things had become physically and irreversibly limited. Every single thing she did, aside from drinking blood, was like the last bite of food one takes just to clear the plate when they're not hungry anymore, the tired and sore feet after a whole day at an amusement park; requiring more effort than instinct, it was all almost boring. Everything immaterial was the only thing that could really matter to her now. The sudden emotional trepidation she'd felt with the Cullens since her transformation made the abstract pull between her and Jacob the only part of her previous life that had yet managed to float to the surface.

She frowned as she stared down into the creek, then allowed some of the moist dirt to smear splotches around her paper-white knees as she lowered herself a little to dip her feet in the water next to Jacob's, wanting but not wanting to coil her toes up to his and maybe hoping the streaming of the water would carry his emanating heat to her submerged skin without them having to touch any more than they were now, with their shoulders propped close together.

Through all of her thoughts, Jacob was examining her face with a mix of careful awe and concern. Sometimes when she caught him glancing at her like he'd never seen her before, it took her a moment to remember she didn't exactly look like she used to.

"What are you thinking about?" Jacob finally asked, the question awkwardly missing the casual tone it would have in the everyday conversations in other lives.

It took her a moment to paraphrase the depth of it in her thoughts. Finally she let out a slightly incredulous bitter laugh and just said, "Sex."

He responded with a small smirk of astonishment, but when he seemed to figure out what she meant, a kind of grim scoff.

"God, you know..." She looked down with a slow amazed shake. "It was just everywhere...When you're young, it's like it's all anybody thinks about, and you think it's going to matter if you die young that you never got a chance to experience all that. But then, you know...I'm dead, and it's the last thing on my mind, it just didn't matter compared to all these other things. But I never did that...And it feels like I'm just now realizing it."

In a mingling motion of hesitation and comfort, Jacob reached up the arm that had been craned against hers up slowly behind her back and touched the back of her head with a mix of distaste and fascination. Then his fingers gently traced a few strands of thick hair as if testing whether the texture was any different now. He dared a consoling massage to the back of her neck, inviting her head to slowly tilt against his shoulder.

"Would you..." He sighed. "Could you please stop that?"

"...What?"

"You've been holding your breath. It's creepy." After an uneasy sidelong glance, he added almost matter-of-factly, "And it's not fair."

She shifted on her rested cheek to look up at him for half a second before looking forward and allowing her lungs to respire. It didn't take long for her smell to fog up with Jacob's scent, this close to him with his unkempt hair teeming with it. Her body automatically stiffened in protest of their proximity, and Jacob leaned back away from her before she had the chance to resist her instincts. Instead of reflecting his action, she also propped herself back slightly, her body supported by her hand on the grass under the arc of his identically positioned arm. Her head lingered so that she was kind of leaned over but not touching his chest right under the shoulder, looking down in an appearance of pensive suspension.

"Can I ask you something?" Bella quietly said, "And don't tell me that I don't want to know."

Jacob said nothing in protest, but he felt to her a little caught off guard.

"When I was taken to your house that night..."

He took a moment to nod, as if to confirm he was prepared for the subject.

She explained, carefully stepping around directly mentioning what she'd been going through, maybe for both their sakes. "I only have vague images from that shortly after. Like it was a dream—More like how you might be aware that you're in a bed even when you're not waking up from some awful nightmare. But it wasn't until around the third day that I remember acknowledging anything around me, what anybody might be trying to say to me. It took me so long to even open my eyes, I just wanted it to be a dream, or I wanted to really _die_..."

Their position made it so that it would be awkward to try to look right at each other, and it may have been a convenience for Jacob, who seemed to only stare numbly forward or down through all of this.

"I wanted to ask you," she continued cautiously, "if the pack considered just...ending it."

Jacob's gaze tensed away just slightly and his breathing cracked with a kind of dry shudder. With a measured tone, he finally explicated, "We weren't sure what we were supposed to do. When it comes to that—Of course there was no breaking of the treaty, but you weren't considered under the treaty anyway, you were just some...But who was thinking that technically? If one of us—whoever was actually capable of doing it—did it, it would've been out of pity. None of us expected something like this to happen, you know it would've been for you..." Jacob's voice was breaking off miserably, his arms beginning to tremble slightly. Bella's free hand automatically went to him, but rested in-between them again, not knowing what to do, if she should actually get farther away.

He breathed in and out one labored breath, then said, "They made it my choice."

Bella pressed her lips together, her eyes widening in her immediate attempt to retain her composure. She sat up a bit straighter, looked forward into the distance for a moment, and finally flatly demanded, "Why?"

Jacob hesitated, trying to measure her reaction, not sure if she was angry.

She repeated almost at a whisper, "Why, Jake? Why not just let me die?"

In his hesitance, he turned his position so that he was sitting facing her, his legs stretched in front so that his feet were barely situated on either side of her.

"Are you serious?" He finally said, quietly but shamelessly, "Because I need you. And I don't mean need you around, I need you _somewhere_...Could you honestly expect me to make a decision that ensures that you would no longer exist?"

She said nothing, just staring forward as if she wasn't even listening to anything he said.

"And yeah, I guess it's really selfish, that I practically told you you'd be dead to me if you chose to be this way, and then ended up choosing it for you because it was the only way you wouldn't have to be destroyed. And of course I knew all the grief you'd have to go through. But it was just too..." Jacob's voice wavered a little, "Too soon. I couldn't just let you die. It wasn't your time..."

Her face turned to him with quietly flaring bitterness. "Wasn't my _time_?...I _died_, Jacob. I was dead the moment he found me out there. There was nothing you could do. There was nothing anyone could do."

With a wounded look he examined her intently, finally shaking his head and saying, "You'd think...given what I am, that I could feel that way about it. And when I had to make myself face what was happening to you, I tried to just start telling myself that you were gone and that was that. And it was easy enough to believe that when I saw you, so messed up by the agony it was like...you weren't even in there. But then..."

Bella drew her legs up to her body, hugging herself around the knees, the lacy hem of her summer skirt blowing lightly in the breeze the most animated movement around her stony body right then.

"...I was looking away from you, and I was against the wall across the room. And after a moment I realized I could smell you..." Jacob leaned up closer to Bella. "Even then you were more, you know. Potent. I could detect everything changing in your body from across the room, and it was sickening that you could smell so awful to me, before I realized...part of it was just you, it was the way you've always smelled. And as much as I couldn't stand those two things mixed together into one thing, I couldn't deny that you were still Bella. And that maybe, in a way, you could live."

Jacob took Bella's lack of response in acceptance that any anger seemed to have left her, replaced with the usual pulse of misery in her face. He shifted back closer to her, only to have his senses newly irritated; his eyes watered and he bent his head over his knees to rub them, his voice letting out in a kind of coughing grunt mixed with a sigh of despair. Seemingly disarmed by that, Bella's face filled with grim empathy, and she inched away from him, pulling her dress over her legs and crossing her arms. The image of that was even sad to him: that he gave her a reason to feel self-conscious with such a flawless exterior. Her new appearance was one thing they had not talked about, but in an exchange of glances it was often known that they were both thinking about it.

Looking like he longed to touch her, knowing that he should not and didn't want to, he went on, "It was too much of you. I swear, it's like...You smell so ugly, but you also smell like _you_. And _better_. It's the same with how you look. You're more of you than I can take."

As if needing some distance, he stood up and took some tired steps until his right shoulder was propped against a tree several feet away from where he'd been sitting. Standing against it, he looked off into the same distant haze Bella had been fixed on with a demeanor of resignation.

"You're not dead, Bella," he softly insisted. "You just want to be."

She had to look away, as if she could actually wound Jacob with the look of anguish coming upon her face, her figure tightly collapsing; she moaned, "It just doesn't seem real...Everything's broken up." Her hands in her lap were contorted, claw-like white trees. "God, Jake, my dad's—in _pieces_..."

"—No. No," Jacob was urgently saying, coming behind to quiet her with his hands brushing through her hair, pressing his lips briefly to the top of her head.

"Don't do that. Don't."

Both their hands were shaking, but he didn't care. He didn't know what else to do.

"Don't ever."


	4. Three

She hunted.

She couldn't go to the far places with the bigger animals because there was no way of getting to them that guaranteed no risky proximity to the better blood. Alice insisted deer wasn't too bad, definitely better than raccoons or whatever Bella had been picking off. Bella found herself almost foolishly waiting around for someone to teach her how to do something when she smelled two creatures together, big enough, and Edward just nodded at her and she gave in, her feet flying impossibly fast and her body carried effortlessly in the violent intention to take one down, and when she did it was like crumpling a piece of notebook paper to break its neck. Quickly she solved the unpleasant texture of the hair by ripping off a good portion of skin, and then the soft muscle, liquid and warm on her teeth, the blood entering her system like a steady electric surge.

It could be better. This would always be true.

Edward was then right next to her, but he spotted his own game and hesitantly left her side. Bella sat up and back, cross-legged in front of the kill, looking to scan the distance for whatever animal Edward was pursuing. But something in her immediate vision...

Right close to her, a young fawn, all cottony and clumsy, shivering on its legs slowly towards the carcass in front of her. Having no recognition, it faltered back, and its head was low when it sauntered away slowly, solitary.

Bella's body became very still except for a hand reaching gradually down, feeling for the top of the deer's head lying close to her knee, its smooth bristled surface between the ears. With a shaky exhale, she held unmoving for one second before giving down with her shoulders.

She had already acknowledged that Rosalie was approaching at walking pace. Her new sister, clean and thin in her jeans, stopped where she found Bella just outside of her vision over her shoulder; Rosalie leaned into a protruding appendage of a birch with a look almost like fear when she heard the tiniest angry moan, the sound of bones cracking slowly into sawdust between Bella's cringing fingers.

When Bella's head slumped over as if in shame, Rosalie went to her, her footsteps graceful and silent over the dry leaves. Bella felt her standing close at her side, just a tenth of an inch from touching her. She reached up her limp-feeling hands all smeared with purple-red, as if to wipe them on her blouse, but then only dropped them in helpless disgust with the knuckles down on her lap. She wasn't clean like the others, her mind always somewhere else.

Rosalie took half of a self-debating movement forward, then crouched down on long agile legs, sort of like a graceful insect, in front of Bella, avoiding the severity of looking her right in the face. "The males and females smell distinct from each other," she explained flatly. "It will be a while till you can tell the difference, but if there are two of them, or if it's young, or if it's a female, and you don't have the stomach for it...Always check. And you broke the neck wrong. If you want it to be painless, you applied too much pressure before you snapped it."

Edward had returned, was standing close by over Rosalie's shoulder in trepidation, and after a pause of reading Rosalie's thoughts directed at him, turned back.

He would go to Carlisle and Esme, tell them Bella carried many guilts about her but this was one he couldn't understand. He would tell them that he was scared. He would tell them, trying to piece everything out, how it's always hard to adjust; remind them how hard it was for him, but that even he eventually realized that it wasn't his fault, that he didn't choose this.

And Esme would sadly whisper, "But she did."

.

.

.

.

One day when Jacob and Bella had their backs to a huge tree trunk in a crackling downfall of rain, he said something he seemed to have been wanting to ask for a while.

"The others, the rest of the pack," he explained, "They don't know that I've been seeing you. I didn't tell them, but I was just waiting for them to see it, or maybe smell it? They don't know." He looked narrowly at her. "How do you do that?"

Bella, like him, was beginning to figure out that she had a talent. Secrets. The first few times she'd met Jacob, her only attempt to skirt around having to talk about that with the family was an immediate shower as soon as she got to the house. It still left a hint of the smell, and Alice should have been able to figure it out. She'd detected none of the restrained curiosity she'd expected. Everybody should have had a good idea where she'd been going at night, but it was almost like they barely pondered it.

She didn't understand how she could make that happen without knowing she could do it; but eventually, as her visits to her werewolf became routinely needed, as the possibility of the Cullens leaving Forks loomed up just waiting to be protested for Bella's needs, she didn't want it to be a secret any more, and it wasn't. This would allow the pack to see everything the next time the wolves went running together, and though Bella imagined Jacob would get the same look of strange worry and confusion she'd gotten from Alice the first time she could smell Jacob on Bella's laundry, of course she couldn't protect them both from exposing their nighttime lives to those around them forever. Then again, she probably could. But there was something admittedly uncomfortable about forcing what was essentially an artificial stupidity into those she loved for the sake of a dependence on privacy.

They still hadn't gotten rid of Bella's bed at the Cullen house when one night she was slowly hanging up some new clothes Alice had ordered for her from some Italian boutique; Edward had been sitting on the bed reading one of his poetry volumes when she came in, but it didn't take long for her to sense that he was just desolately staring at the pages when he was even looking at the book at all. When she was done, she found it hard to turn around; she slowly tucked flat the black paper bag she was holding, folded it in half, then sighed and slipped it more carelessly between a couple satiny shoe boxes on the top shelf.

Her feet padded gracefully and soundlessly on the way to the bedroom door. But Edward said, "Bella—" and her direction shifted to a heavy current that brought her to his side. With a breath that sounded almost frightened, his arms closed around her hips. She cradled his head against her with a gentle care that was reminiscent of how he used to have to handle her.

After seemingly gathering his thoughts enough to calm himself down, Edward said in an aching quiet, "I won't be able to lose you like this."

Bella became more still before flatly replying, "You _can't _lose me."

Edward shook his head. "It all went so wrong, Bella. You're becoming—not even someone else—you're becoming a void. And you're just so consumed by this self-loathing..."

"I don't want to talk about Dad," Bella replied a little hotly, like quivering her hand back from being burned.

"Bella, it's_ not_ your _fault_."

"That means nothing coming from you." Bella shook her head, her glossy red eyes steeling with honesty against the small note of regret at having to say it. "When would you ever hold it against me if I did something terrible? Forgiveness just isn't something you can grant me."

She let out a breath, but it caught as she saw the hurt deepening in Edward's expression and she quickly said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."

"Don't you understand why I'm scared?" Edward stood up with a rising urgency, almost seeming angry. "If you let all this bitterness take over you, you'll just get lost. And you'll end up like most."

"You think that I'll..." Bella looked at him through a fragile daze that was just waiting to flare up in anger. "I'm not a murderer, Edward."

Edward glared down at their feet, seemingly to avoid looking that way at her, before heavily refuting, "Neither was I."

Bella's face slowly fell; she backed just a step away from Edward and hugged her arms to herself as if she was cold.

"I won't ask you to stop all this. You don't need to explain anything to me," Edward said in a gentle, measured tone. "But I can't let you go to him in denial of the fact that he can't always be there—And then what will you do about the guilt, if you can't ever realize that it doesn't belong to you? Whether he's gone tomorrow, or seventy years from now, can you afford to mourn him? Another living soul whose pain you so readily take responsibility for? What then? Could you come home to me and still be my Bella?"

Her head dropped slowly, a layer of silky dark hair falling over her eyes. She stood that way silently until Edward, weakened, stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. The small sound of her breathing became quick and desperate, and her voice muttered into his ivory shoulder, "I'm still here. I'm still here. Edward..."

The slight cold of their skin brushing together created the sensation of a gust of wind coming in from the window, everything becoming awash with the candid color of moonlight. The fabric between them felt so thin; the air was so thin and the night was thin like white gauze peeling easily away, and it fit like an elegant glove when Bella found herself holding Edward so close to her body that she could hardly remember the forbidden nature of their physical contact from when she was human. And of course it crossed her mind, the price she'd paid for this, that maybe it was despicable for her to enjoy any of the things she couldn't do before. But out there in the woods somewhere there was a boy that bore the meaningless potential of her life in his palm, a young man she'd hurt and who would be waiting for her anyway, in the middle of the night, whenever she needed him. And that was enough to let her think that she deserved something, for now; to allow Edward to patch up the half of her heart that still remembered its own love for him.

.

.

.

.

One foggy early morning when the sun was barely beginning to patch down between branches, Jacob was pacing around the pines, pulling his jacket off, peering up into the treetops with a look of slight irritation.

"Bella!" he hollered up. "I can smell you!"

There was a deep graceful fall and the thud of both solid feet and one hand; she landed, laughing, right behind him. He turned at her with chagrin.

"Sneaky leech," he said with a smirk. She communicated a _Shut up_ by briefly rolling her eyes.

These were the best days, filled with their own impossible versions of childlike games. Jacob would take wolf form and they'd run, racing each other or racing nothing, flitting around and between all the trees until everything except for them became a blur and didn't seem real. It reminded her of the days of their motorcycles humming fast over the La Push dirt roads, the wind licking in their hair, their laughters not drowning in the noise and speed but seeming to become it.

They halted near the edge when they came close to the beach, Bella managing to erase the momentum with a quick lilting step, Jacob slowing and stopping in the process of thawing down to his human body. Clawing idly at the stringy length of his hair, he muttered a curse word as he looked around on the ground in several directions.

Bella was merely looking him over with friendly derision. With a scoffing tone, she asked, "Did you lose your clothes?"

"Yes," Jacob replied, laughing a little at himself but hardly embarrassed. Bella was already a flitting blur in the nearby trees and shrubs, returning in some ten seconds holding the bundle along the partly shredded long rope.

"Here." She swung the rope teasingly a couple times, then after catching a whiff made a face, complaining, "Bleh. They're sweaty," bunching the cloth up and pitching it straight to his torso.

He laughed huskily, not bothering with any privacy as he began untangling his pant legs. Bella herself was considerably bare in only a thin cami top and briefs. As their paired forms, dark and pale, wound through the woods more and more like animals every day, any kind of loose clothing had only become a nuisance that would go home shredded by the brambles.

When Jacob, holding his t-shirt between his teeth, was slipping a foot into one pant leg, he paused at the realization that Bella had walked a couple steps away and then gone completely still. He could tell she'd stopped breathing.

"Bella?"

Her helpless face turned just slightly. She looked horrified, terrified; completely maddened.

He heard it then, just faintly. A voice hollering from on the beach, an echo carried by the wind. Bella flinched.

"No—"

With a terrible groan, Bella hauled herself up and tore away, heading lightning-fast to the edges of the shade, but because of Jacob's quick perception of what she was about to do she found herself slamming into a teeming surface of wolf hair.

She stepped back, almost stunned, as Jacob narrowed his frame into an aggressive warning growl. Then she kind of stumbled back, her face tightened by impossible restraint, turning and making rapidly but stiffly back into the forest.

Jacob dephased, picked up his jeans again and slowly put them on, then was sloppily pulling on his t-shirt as he followed where Bella had gone, knowing she'd run far enough to get control of herself. It was almost ten minutes of walking before he heard the brisk drop of her feet landing from far up. He turned in the direction of the sound and soon enough made out the blurry checker texture of her white body speckled with faint shadows approaching at a staggered pace.

She was holding a dead owl between her hands, biting into it like a child walking along sucking on an orange. Her expression was one of queasy self-disgust mingled with a relaxed relief, and it was easy to see how her entire body yielded to the sickening need, all the feathers poking out in a disfigured spray from where it obscured the sight of her lethal teeth.

It was something Jacob just couldn't see. He turned his head away, sort of awkwardly looking down like one does when they've just caught somebody in the middle of something really embarrassing, giving them a moment to pull their pants on in the most terribly silent way. Bella soon rid her hands of the corpse and slowly came up to Jacob's side, her face pulled flat in an almost sheepish look that encompassed what had manifest itself in her as heavy disappointment. Her face was perfectly clean and she seemed to not have made any mess at all, but there were a couple slivering lines of red dripping down one hand and Jacob was the first to notice. As if to impatiently dispel any further unease Jacob went ahead and took her hand, slowly smudged the blood off on his shirt, not quite looking her in the eyes and with a visible tension in his jaw. She was a bit more touched by the action than he might have expected. Her hand lingered over the fabric of his shirt. He picked it up and held it between both of his hands as if he was trying to keep it warm. When his controlled eyes met hers they held more sympathy than disgust, colored with an expression so far from what she'd imagined he was thinking of her a second ago it was like an unexpected splintering of comfortable light.

They went and sat down in the slow-motion twinkling of dusk, remaining silent for a very long time. When Bella finally stood up to leave, Jacob half-nervously asked her if there was any particular reason they always saw each other at night.

She thought for a second, trying to scrutinize if there were any complicated implications to what he was asking. She supposed it was a perfectly simple concern, thinking aloud, "Oh...I guess your social life would be suffering by staying up all night all the time..."

He crooked half a smile, saying nothing until she answered the question.

"No, there's really no specific reason."

His face lit up just a little. "So could you come tomorrow? In the afternoon?"

"...Sure, I don't see why I couldn't start coming in the daytime. Except..." She nervously scratched at a nonexistent itch on her arm. "When more people are outside...What happened earlier..."

"Maybe that's the idea," Jacob hinted. "Face it, you're never going to get better at it by staying as far away from civilization as possible."

"That's...a unique viewpoint," Bella said with a lift of the eyebrows. "But it's way too dangerous. I'm still young, I'm stronger than the rest of the Cullens and I could end up ripping your arms off if my instincts got me carried away."

It both frustrated her and lifted her spirits a little that Jacob was smiling beside himself like he actually found that funny. "You honestly think you would do that?"

She wanted to smile back. After a moment she just said, "I'll see you tomorrow."

.

.

.

.

The drive was an aggravation, even with only a very occasional passing of a car on the country highway that made Bella's body stiffen slightly in restraint, but Rosalie promised better hunting in the desert-like Arizona regions. She apparently had a preference for peccary, which Emmett teasingly described as "Those _ugly_ things?" It almost made Bella laugh; she could remember learning about all these animals at her Phoenix grade school, but there had been one lunch table conversation when she'd mentioned javelinas and Mike Newton insisted she was making up words.

By morning they were in the middle of a vast, bare plain where no living soul would be wandering for miles on either side. As the sun was rising up a piercing light on the horizon, Rosalie and Bella were standing side-by-side, poised in the kind of stillness that just let the world circulate its distance around them, waiting, sometimes with their eyes closed, to pick up a scent. This method of hunting, while maybe inefficient, allowed for the only conversations Rosalie and Bella ever really had apart from the rest of the family. During the course of Bella's adjustment, the two of them had found a benefit in practically becoming exclusive hunting partners, and this odd variety of intimacy was the basis of how their rapport had improved. They never spent time together doing anything else. Their connection was of two sisters, not of friends.

When the sun had come blazing into their skies, Bella looked down at her own arm and wiggled her alarmingly shining fingers closer to her face. She'd seen her own skin come alive with glittering light, but never in such a bright open place where her entire body just resonated at the skin.

Rosalie looked over with a relaxed smile. "I like to think we'd look like a mirage. Was it always so hot when you lived around here?"

"No, not always." Bella dropped her hands back at her sides where they suspended slightly off her hips in an anxiously ready stance. "How long have we been standing here, thirty minutes? I'm starting to wonder what woodpecker would taste like."

Rosalie looked at Bella for a beat before looking back forward and closing her eyes to bask in the direct light; it was almost like a conversation over sun-tanning. "You want to tell me about your special talent, then?"

It could only make Bella smile a little, the way that Rosalie brought up in such a relaxed invitation what the rest of the family seemed adverse to regarding in the fear that she wouldn't want to talk about it. "Somebody's hungry for gossip," she teased.

Rosalie let out a deep, musical laugh that approached that sisterly fashion of being somewhere between loving amusement and mockery before she exclaimed, "It's not like I'm going to _tell_ anybody. Well, except for Emmett..."

Bella rolled her eyes in understanding. After a brief pause, she flatly explained. "As far as I've figured it out, I can negatively manipulate people's perceptions of...things. If I don't want a person to know something, it's completely impossible for them to figure it out. And the only way I can control it is to change my mind about whether I want them to know."

Rosalie's face stiffly considered that for a moment, in her thoughtful expression that sometimes looked deceivingly twisted with slight disgust. She finally commented, "I suppose that's fitting." It wouldn't be the first time Bella had pondered whether that could be taken as a compliment, but she wasn't dwelling on it now, since Rosalie seemed entirely neutral about the implications of her abilities. "But how far can you take it? Could you make yourself invisible?"

Bella had tried this kind of thing on many occasions, often for Jacob's curiosity. "I don't know, it's only things people don't know already, and I imagine that physical perception is a lot harder to erase. It's not like I could make anybody forget something."

Rosalie gave the slightest nod like that was the kind of response she expected, "So it's secrets. You're your own..._Secret Keeper_ or something."

Bella had a delayed adjustment to Rosalie's response. After a moment, she very slowly turned her head to the side, her face squinted with disbelief. "_You_ read Harry Potter?"

Rosalie offered the simple explanation of, "Esme could talk me into anything." After a moment, her body strained a little. She pointed with a sudden certainty in a direction up Bella's right and just said, "Bobcat."

.

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.

The word "picnic" put an ironic scour on Bella's tumultuous state, as she and Jacob, even equipped with their own blanket underneath them, lay obscured by the richest patch of trees close to a sun-honeyed meadow where a family of three were having just that. A relaxed Saturday outing, and food, while Bella's system already full with animal blood was screaming at her that the people enjoying this food _were_ food. They had been at this for thirty minutes: trying to keep up a regular conversation they'd be having if Bella wasn't practically being driven mad. She lay on her chest next to Jacob, fists clenching tightly beneath her, and when she seemed really about to lose it he'd automatically put his arm over her.

"You know that wouldn't actually do any good if I tried to take off?" she grumbled at Jacob, covering her nose simultaneously against him and the all-too-pleasant much more distant smell.

"It might if I phased," he suggested, laughing a little arrogantly at her as he imagined Bella suddenly pinned under the weight of a giant paw.

"I told you I don't want you to do that." She'd insisted on this, repeatedly: Only if he absolutely needed to. Having him phase around her when he wasn't in a good mood presented a whole other danger for both of them.

"But isn't that the reason you're doing this with me? The big 'just in case'...I can fight you off? If it was you and a Cullen they couldn't stop you."

She was silent for a second before assuring him, "I'm stronger than you, Jacob. Not as strong as I've been, but for a while I'm still...And that's not even the point."

She cut herself off in an onrush of the terrible urge, coarsely rubbing her fingers into the dirt, her breaths heaving.

Slightly flared by his distaste at seeing Bella like this, he remarked with a tone of annoyance, "Wouldn't it help some if you stopped breathing?"

"But I _want_ to smell it," she snapped. "Don't you get it? God, maybe if I got closer..."

Bella stood up, and Jacob warily covered her path. "Oh, come on," he sighed with disappointment.

She stepped up to him and gave him a glowering but non-emphatic shove to the chest. His body lilted back just a little before he responded by pivoting himself towards her at an angle that suddenly allowed him to lightly pin her back to a tree, resting his palms on the chipped trunk at either side of her shoulders. She frowned indifferently as he grinned beside himself. She knew he'd be too bothered by their proximity to relish it for much longer.

At that thought, a sinking ache of loss entered her gut; she was realizing more fully than before this small thing among so much that she'd lost. How Jacob's admiration of her had just lit up, bloomed into her and filled her with a more brisk confidence when they used to always be so close to each other, hand in hand or shoulder to shoulder. Now their physical contact could only offer brief glimmers of this before they recoiled from the discomfort. It had occurred to Bella long ago how sad it was that she was now naturally repelled from her closest friend, but somehow she was stung more deeply than ever at the inner revelation that Jacob's magnetic attraction to her, having been something she forcefully thought too little of to consider how she took it for granted, was now vanquished for a reason beyond his own control.

Whatever Jacob thought Bella was thinking about, he was intending to talk her somewhere away from it. "What _is_ the point?" he asked, prodding for some continuation of their previous exchange.

She looked at him in the eyes, gathering her self-control enough for the moment. "I thought...I figured I could control myself around you better because you would never forgive me if I failed. If I slip up...Edward will be _disappointed_. But he'll understand. I don't want somebody who would understand. You'd just hate me more than you already do."

She'd lost her concentration. Her eyes shifted wide open towards the clearing. She pushed Jacob's arm away, began walking away, not running, knowing he'd stop her but just _wanting_...

In no time he was covering her front again, grabbing her wrists in what she could feel was a furiously hard grip but couldn't hurt her at all. "Stop. We're staying right here," he commanded irritably; he pushed her back against the tree with her hands locked at her sides. She could have easily pulled out of his grasp; it was the dark warning look in his eyes that made her stand still.

Her head rocked back against the tree trunk. She laughed bitterly. "You do hate me, don't you?"

Jacob's anger stayed solidified where he had her hands and arms restrained. His instincts agreed with her comment, but the rest of him resented it; as he had her pinned down he let out a sigh that loosened him in the chest, and he let the side of his face slowly rest so that his head was slightly above and next to hers. Their bodies felt forcibly rather than willingly tilted together, him seeming to make himself lie down in all the waste just to be close to her, sinking through suffocating sand all the way to the bottom that was her body. With his gaze turned up and away he could only feel her, but she wouldn't even feel like a girl, _the_ girl he once freely loved with a crackling heat that barely ever existed in someone so young. Bella couldn't even place how she'd become so aware of this part of him; the closeness was uncomfortable and she opened her mouth to mutter, _What are you doing?_ but only managed to weakly mouth it next to his shoulder. She knew what he was doing. Bella Swan, having been so robbed from his physical senses, was hurting in every possible non-tangible way, and he couldn't even get inside; he couldn't hold her together if the pieces were stuck in all the wrong order. Not if he hated being this close. She heard the sad smile in his voice when he poised his head down slightly to mutter into her ear.

"Bells, honey, I loathe you," he gently promised. "I always will."


	5. Four

On a summer morning, after distantly noting the color of her eyes in the grand hallway mirror, Bella wanted to go out among people. Edward was thankfully out hunting with Jasper, Alice and Carlisle. Emmett, Bella figured, was the only one who would take her word for it that she was ready to be out in public, so she asked him to accompany her. He picked up Carlisle's little flashlight and beamed it into her pupils in a mock-doctorly way. "Trust me, I've over-hunted," she said with a laugh.

They found a busy outdoor market in Oak Harbor and slowly strolled around the kiosks in their relaxed grace, occasionally giving polite smiles to all the sellers whose business they of course declined. Bella only had to stiffen in resistance when someone came close enough to brush up against her. She was glad that Emmett was able to watch out for her self-control without mistrustingly reaching for her arm whenever this happened. After a while, he seemed impressed with her restraint.

"Can you distinguish at all..."

"No, not very well." Bella shook her head, already knowing what he was asking. Jacob had been curious before, and now that she was surrounded by a lot more people, it only confirmed that human blood was just a swimming temptation to her senses, all of it the same and equally provoking. They paced up and down the same aisle where it was the least occupied with people.

Emmett nodded, probably expecting that to be her answer. "That won't be for a while. It's great, though, you'll like it."

Bella gave a half-smile. "Emmett...?" She'd just remembered something she'd been wondering about lately, and she'd decided Emmett was one of the more suitable people to ask.

"Yes?" he beamed at her eagerly.

"You remember a little bit of your human life, right?"

He reacted like she'd hoped; he seemed totally oblivious to how this topic could be grim in any way. "Yeah, some little things."

"But, you know...what kinds of things?"

"You'll remember some faces, some experiences...It seems like you retain things from your childhood and from the most recent the most vividly. The bookends. And you might remember some general things that don't have any certain event tied to them. Like I remember that I got spanked a lot as a kid..."

Bella smiled, then tried to slowly explain. "I guess I just want to figure out the parts that are the most important for me to remember, to always try to think about. I know Rosalie...She dwelled on things that were less important to hold on to..." Bella paused, knowing she was broaching the only topic she knew could make Emmett resistant. "...And she wishes she'd remembered parts of her life that mattered to her more. But I just can't begin to sort out what the most important things are to me. I mean, how can I begin?"

"Hmm." As Emmett casually considered her question, he meandered over to a stand where he theatrically pretended to examine some apples. Bella smirked lovingly as he gave a toothy grin to the vendor and happily jingled out a couple quarters to give him.

"Well..." Emmett began as they walked primly off again, him now holding a ripe yellow apple. "If you were to ask Carlisle this question, I'm sure he would say something about holding onto your integrity and all of your human virtue...I can admit we all owe it to him that _he_ did that..."

Bella pressed her lips together knowingly. "But?"

Emmett smiled and tossed up the apple, catching it repeatedly in his palm as they walked farther away from the crowds. "My input is that if you think too much about what you want to remember you're gonna miss out on remembering all the good stuff. You may think you need to hold onto some of the unpleasantries so that you don't forget all the lessons you've learned?—_Forget_ the lessons. Hell, learn them later...And I don't really need to tell you what the good stuff is, do I?"

It was really the exact answer Bella had expected, and not the comfort she'd feebly hoped for: that she could push herself to remember _all_ the important things. Every Easter Sunday with the chocolate melting on her small hands, every restaurant with a breezy patio where she and Renee had spent hours laughing together, and every moment mingled in that was a first with Edward, a best with Edward. She knew now in a way she never did when she was human how the memory of a love for another person, being so untraceable and intangible, wove itself into many irreplaceable segments and was not the same shape without its every part; she wanted to remember every improvised detail of the age formula she and Jacob had playfully argued about over their RC sodas in those days that she threw her homework into the back of the car, and it wasn't enough to remember a sunset that they watched together but the grainy sound of the earth under their shoes. Every single one of these things seemed to matter more than the rest, and still there was the nagging sense that Emmett was wrong: she had a lesson to learn, and she shouldn't neglect to remind herself of the awful things that she'd done. Things that she'd thought, things that she'd wanted. She had the power to make herself ignorant of them, but it would never be in her nature to let herself forget.

Emmett was looking sidelong at her as they started to walk back. Bella was removing the designer sunglasses that obscured her eyes, and not wanting him to worry, her eyes bounced to follow the apple he was still occasionally tossing in the air. "Waste of money," she teased. "It's not like anybody was suspicious that we weren't buying anything."

"We'll see..." Emmett grinned. "I might need something to throw at Edward when he broods at me for taking you out."

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.

.

The next afternoon that Bella went out to see Jacob, she felt newly relieved, as she was sure he did, about their decision a couple weeks ago that she'd developed adequate self-control. It had seemed in the strenuous period of Jacob assisting her in that aspect that the continuously embittering and at times simply obnoxious experience of it had them kind of automatically wary of each other. It wasn't until they'd gone back to their leisurely visits in the middle of the woods that Bella had realized how much she'd come to dread those uncomfortable meetings; it had begun to seem like they hadn't managed to speak to each other gently in almost half of a year, and they'd quickly fallen back into their old patterns once that element of constant tension was taken away.

Before Jacob appeared to her in one of the sunnier clearings where they frequently spent time, Bella smiled as a rubber ball came sailing with the arc of an upward kick and bounced off of a tree right next to where she'd been resting her elbow.

"What's that?" Bella demanded with a laugh.

Jacob approached in his ripped denim shorts, shrugging. "I found it stuck in a tree on the way here."

She smirked, and in a flicker she'd gone briefly into a darker closing of pines and come back with the medium-sized ball, producing the rubbery plucking noise of the plastic against her hard fingers as she lightly set it back to Jacob. "You're not actually suggesting we play fetch?"

This got her a joking fist-shake of warning just after Jacob caught it between his long hands. With a kind of shrug he chucked the ball far behind his back.

Bella still stood in the shade of the trees until the fraction of a second he'd be expecting to hear the ball hit the grass, at which time he saw she'd flitted away to gracefully snatch it up and was already snapping back. He smirked as he came out to meet her in the clearing.

His pace slowed. "I'm still getting used to that." There was more sun than usual, and Bella's exposed skin was scintillating.

She looked down at one of her arms, then with a weak shrug admitted, "It's still weird to me too," before all-too-quickly planning her aim and then tossing the ball in a smooth athletic arc; it landed wedged between two high branches in a sparser tree where its translucence made it catch the sunlight and glow, a contrived second moon.

They planted themselves under this tree after Jacob confessed his great exhaustion from spending most of the night out with Quil and Bella said she wouldn't mind if he dozed off a little. The ground rose up to the base of the trunk to form a kind of small hill; they both leaned along the elevation to rest their heads against the wood, Bella's head crooked just above Jacob's shoulder and their bodies forming a lopsided 'V' in the rugged grass.

Jacob still squinted at Bella's glimmering, the way it happened in impeccable patches between the branches' shadows, his eyes noting with fascination that through the meshy blue fabric of her dress he could faintly see the gleaming of the covered areas: a pearlescence that winked with the slightest movements of the cloth. Feeling a little strange about it, she insisted, "I thought you were going to sleep."

"Yeah...Won't you get bored?"

"I won't get bored." She shifted away slightly when Jacob unconsciously propped his forearm over his mouth and nose. "Do you want me to leave you alone for a while?"

Jacob's eyes gave her a sidelong glance that didn't travel much farther than the raised bone at the top of her shoulder. He muttered, "I'll live" before his hand reached and gave what was meant to be a reassuring brush to her arm, but there was hesitance and curiosity, like he almost expected her firm skin to feel any different. Bella couldn't help thinking of the first time she saw this with Edward.

"I know," she muttered delicately. "It makes it almost look softer..."

Jacob had finally closed his eyes and was lying still and unresponsive, so Bella fell shyly silent and didn't expect him to say anything. But after a pause, when she'd rested her head back and was looking up into the leafless knots, Jacob calmly pronounced, without opening his eyes, "I like it."

There were times like this when Bella could only stare forward blankly before smiling as the warmth of his words would creep in and bloom through her chest, these quietly excited emotions powerful enough to make her remember a heartbeat; and with that recollection, all the memories would rush and swell to the one vital point and replay more vividly than was possible outside of these moments. It was still hard to be what the two of them used to be before their bodies were stolen from them and transformed into biological opposites, but when they seemed to hold still enough: On these days that Jacob was content, and her friend, as simply as it was when they'd met at the snapping fireside as just two perfectly human teenagers, Bella's guilt thawed out of her and left some regular poor kid that came up missing with her father in yesterday's paper by no fault of her own.

Bella closed her eyes and let her mind take root. She relaxed into a kind of trance that let her thoughts come effortlessly, the heaviest and most deep-woven traces of her life racing to project themselves first.

Even in the calmest, most sedated mind of a vampire, the traffic of thoughts resembles what a human could only experience as a ceaseless and overcrowded clamor of information, and with this mental agility Bella's memories could naturally unfold so that her imagination was quite vividly in multiple places at once. Bella first thought about her and Edward's meadow, so recently reminded of it by Jacob's reaction to the sun on her skin, and it was the second time they'd ever gone there, when he gave her a fancy French braid and told her stories about Emmett and Alice. And like a hazy sound that intercepts but does not interrupt a dream, she heard the occasional clang, the rushing wind of a heady box fan, and the weak transmission of a classic rock song tinning out of Jacob's old radio. She smelled gasoline; she smelled Renee's nail polish, felt the tacky sticky cling of a six-year-old finger testing the almost-dry drip on a newspaper and saw the Fortune Wheel spinning on TV as she was overhearing a conversation with Charlie on the phone. One thought catapulted into many: almost forgotten to her, the unwelcome tickle of a teardrop braving the cinematic fall down a cheek, and several specific instances of glum despair to match. She concentrated on mapping these all together, finding the similarities that connected them, one never remembered without another and another following suit in a bright blue line like a veiny interstate line in a road Atlas.

Bella came slowly out of her deep reverie when she sensed Jacob's eyes on her. Her eyelids opened to see him looking down at her with curious scrutiny.

"...Sweet dreams?" He gave a half-smile, and Bella gave him a blank look, not sure if that was supposed to be a joke. "You almost looked like you were asleep. Even breathing slow..."

"No," Bella replied needlessly, sitting up a little. "I was sort of daydreaming, really. But it's hard to explain - It's a lot different when you can focus on so many things at once..."

Still curious, he quietly asked, "What were you thinking about?"

"All kinds of things. Remembering..." Bella started gesturing her hands with the uncertainty of her explanation. "You know I told you how...it's going to eventually be difficult for me to remember details of my mortal life?"

Jacob's face became grimmer, but he slightly nodded.

"When I have time to just think, I sort of let my mind go where it wants and revisit all these old memories. I guess I'm just trying to process the stuff that's the most important to me by making it so that I'll remember what my mind just _makes_ me remember. It's not much of a scientific approach. Who knows, does a vampire even have a subconscious?"

Jacob cracked an attempt at his old smile, looking at Bella's face with some pensive affection. He reached a hand up to brush a couple strands of her hair behind her ear, a rare form of physical contact that ever happened between them. He knew he was being brave when he asked, "Do you think about Charlie?"

Bella brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, looking away from Jacob for a few seconds until she muttered, "Of course I do."

More hesitantly, Jacob bit his lip for a moment until he kicked himself into adding, "Do you ever think it would be easier if you didn't?"

She looked at him searchingly and gradually arrived at astonishment. "You mean if I didn't remember him?"

"I'm sorry..." Jacob clumsily choked on his caution before adding in conflicted frustration, "But it just tears you up thinking about him. And sometimes I think you'll never stop blaming yourself for what happened. And I get it—Cause why shouldn't it be your fault, right? Since you were already planning on hurting him so bad? I get it, okay, but it's bullshit."

In response to his sudden conviction Bella was now all fragile and defensive, her body coiling away from his almost with disgust. Jacob sighed heavily and restlessly stood up.

"The part that doesn't add up to me, is where it feels all perversely fitting to you that even after this terrible thing happened, you got exactly what you'd wanted. But maybe if you weren't wallowing in how crappy you feel about everything you'd give yourself enough respect to realize that _maybe_, if you'd still had a choice, you would've changed your mind."

Bella looked almost angrily up at Jacob, who'd paced several steps back from where she was sitting.

"Because you're a good person, and you don't want to hurt anyone. Because you love your parents," Jacob explained flatly. "And maybe just because you were in love with me."

Bella rubbed a hand over her brows, restlessly combing her bangs from her eyes. "Maybe you don't know what you're talking about?"

"Yeah?" Jacob laughed bitterly. "Are you messing with me, or do you really not remember what it was like, when it was just the two of us? You honestly think that if he hadn't come back until even a little bit later, you and me wouldn't have been..."

Bella scoffed and tried to give a low blow. "And you don't think I would've gone back to him anyway? I was always pretty good at hurting you."

"For Christ sake," Jacob practically whined. "You think you're this awful person."

Bella's voice was shaky and clipping when she snapped, "No. I don't. I think I killed my father and I'm always going to think that unless I forget he ever existed. You really don't know, do you, that I think about him _constantly_? I'm the last person in the world who can do this and I don't know why I ever thought I could. It's not _funny_, and it's not so you can contemplate my _regret_, or do whatever amuses you..."

Her sudden weakness made Jacob take a few steps back to her, his expression pulled from a looming desperation. "What regret, what do you mean?...Over ever wanting it?"

Bella's arm fell limply into her lap, her face tightened as if she could start shaking and sobbing. Jacob came closer and sat back down, slowing his breath to prepare his senses as he gripped her around her hard shoulders. Her frame calmed just slightly and she slowly brought her hands up over her face, letting out a slow burdened catch of air. And she whispered, "Listen, I don't know. I'm scared."

The sun was going down, and a colder breeze picked up as Jacob sat still next to her, not knowing what to say. Finally he just muttered an apology, sounding like a sad child.

"I'm sorry."

Bella let out another rough sigh. "I don't want to forget all these things, but sooner or later I won't want to remember. Jacob...You can't keep doing this, right? With me? And some day I just won't be able to get to you, and I'm letting myself need it too much. And I'm starting to feel like I'm not changing right, like I'm still different from them, as if I wasn't made to exist like this...You're used to me denying things, and in this case it might even be the healthy reaction, but I don't have the luxury of going through the stages and I'm stuck with this guilt." She looked off to the right, her thoughts sifting into trouble, he could tell. It seemed she was daring to admit something to herself when she quietly declared it: "I don't want to live forever."

"You won't," Jacob said in a calming tone. "I promise."

She shook her head with a disbelieving grimace. "How can you promise?"

"You've seen enough vampires destroyed to know that they're not really immortal. Probably nothing is. Sooner or later everything burns, it just has to."

At that brief affirmation that was reminiscent of how a parent would passively uncomplicate something to a child, Bella was quiet for a moment, considering maybe she should leave it at that. But she didn't. "Vampires die when they anger other vampires. They tear each other apart like fiends...I don't want that, I want to die like...a _person_, not like a monster."

Jacob stared at the ground, holding rock-still like he needed to stay calm, almost like he was worried he'd lose control.

His jaw tensed. He asked, "You got any ideas?"

She moved very slowly forward, his arm dropping from around her as she bent down into something a lot like sending up a terrified prayer with her face ducking down into her knees. Her admission came from an angry suppressed tremble, an uncontrollable calculation always ticking deep inside her that had bluntly arrived at nothing but cruel truths, never with any way out.

"You could do it."

She heard a cracking breath like a filthy word coming out of Jacob's mouth without the strength of air to pitch his fury into sound. He cowered in on himself for only a moment before he shot up quickly enough to alarm Bella when he started walking quickly away into the spotted shadows of dusk, his hands trembling.

She waited.

When he started walking back, the beaten posture and redness around his eyes was like the state of someone who'd just thrown up. His jaw shuddered; she opened her mouth to speak and he cut her off.

"How _long_, exactly, have you been planning on asking me to do you this little favor?" His voice was sour and grating almost beyond recognition. "I guess I'm supposed to feel like this is my responsibility, since I chose for you to live—"

"No. No..." Bella shook her head, wide-eyed. "And you didn't choose for me to _live_, you just—"

"—_You're alive to me_." Jacob's sudden volume and passion seemed to come out of him uncontrollably, shocking even himself. "I changed my mind about all that faster than you can imagine. It's not enough for you to exist, if that was all I thought there was...I would've rather—"

"You would've rather had me dead?" Bella quietly challenged, almost afraid to throw his own younger words at him.

"Don't." Jacob's fists kept clenching and unclenching; he took a staggering step back, then came forward again, "Why else should it be me? _He_ could...Are you going to tell me that it would be harder for him?"

"Jacob." Bella spoke pleadingly, not just with a wracking fear that Jacob was about to completely explode, but seeming afraid that she herself would weaken. "I am just asking you to do something for me because you are my friend. Not because I think you owe me anything. And we both have a long time to think about this, so just _calm down_..."

Jacob paced heatedly over to a large rock and kicked it forcefully off into a mess of shrubs. Then he turned back, snickering bitterly. "No, I get it, it's been really obvious. Of course, the whole time, this was why you were hanging onto me?"

Bella gave him a look of desperation as if begging him to understand how ridiculous that was, unable to articulate any means of disarming his escalating near-panic.

"I mean, Jesus, Bells, should this have actually crossed my mind before? How do I know you weren't doing one of your mind tricks on me?"

At that, her brows slowly narrowed a little. "Stop being stupid. Never."

"Well, if you didn't want me to figure it out for a while, how do you know?" Jacob sharply pointed out.

Bella gave out a flaring sigh, then slowly collected herself off the ground, standing sternly in front of the tree and seeming like she might be backing farther away if it wasn't there. A deeply frustrated shiver of tension was running through her, and with it she displayed an air of frightened caution.

"Jacob," she said, watching her close friend just walk back and forth with his every feature distorted with a rage she could see was protecting a weak fluttering pain, almost like a vulnerable hole had just been torn out of his stomach. "I'm sorry."

Not enough; too much. With his lips tensed together, Jacob shook his head and came walking up to Bella. He was pulling something out of his back pocket. Giving no thought to their proximity, he glared close up into her face, closing an emphatic grip on her shoulder with his left hand; and holding up with his right, a white book of matches.

"You wanna die?" Jacob said poisonously; he tossed the matches at Bella and they toppled down to her unmoving feet. His breath landed angrily on her face and she wanted to scream, she wanted to clock him in the face. He was a werewolf and he smelled like an_ animal _and she was anything but and none of her senses could remember a lifetime when this mess of a man was an eager boy that saved her life and felt like home, not right now, not right now.

Her thoughts turned quickly into a fearful pleading, _Not right now_ echoing like a metallic clang through her skull; but Jacob couldn't remember either, so he told her to rip her own goddamned head off and set herself on fire, and he turned around and started walking away.

Bella sucked in a grateful breath outside of his close scent, but his words had struck her sick. Her voice shook a growl after him, "That's the kind of end you think is fitting for me?"

Without turning or stopping, he ripped back, "I don't do favors for _bloodsuckers_."

Somehow Jacob sensed that it was as if some terrible whip had cracked and the beastly tempers they always kept subdued had suddenly come unhinged, and despite the fact that Bella was almost silent when she flicked toward him in a gut rage, he phased just in time.

The sound of their impact was loud enough to create a cracking echo through a sizeable circle of the forest, alarming a murmur of many animals: Here and there a ripple of response, a flock of birds somewhere departing from their scattered leisure on some high branches.

What Bella heard, more profoundly, was the curdling whimper when Jacob backed away, limping off of his front leg where she had just struck a long rip in the muscle.

She stood impossibly still as the familiar red wolf turned its eyes on her in a way that splintered her somewhere in her stomach, his features crippled with sadness even in such a powerful body. Too paralyzed to even speak out of her awestruck mouth, she just stood there as he turned and slumped away, disappearing into the collected darkness.

She didn't move; she stood there for many hours into the full light of morning. Alice's vision of her had cleared into focus, and she gradually detected the familiar thumbprint of Edward in her senses before the pale figure quickly appeared in front of her. She fell into the silence of his chest and arms, the impossible quiet of the two like phantoms in a wind. Even as he picked up her heavy body and carried her home straddled around him like a child, a dead silence filled her ears. In her lungs and through her veins, that dusty quiet like waking up in a house to immediately sense that one is alone. She would feel it when she wasn't by herself, a sour underbelly of freezing calm, and her daydreams would fill with a cold longing for reckless clamor, her old broken bones.


	6. Five

Even if he couldn't have assumed by Bella no longer coming to the woods, Jacob knew seven years ago that the Cullens had left. They all felt it because of the feeling of something hot beginning to cool in their bones, all of their senses diminishing to a shallow calm. In the first year they were all ecstatic to have secrets again, and they could easily say that out loud. Even a short time spent as a wolf could teach someone for a lifetime that everybody has something they'd rather hide.

Jacob spent a Thursday night stationed at Paul's truck, with Embry and a sardonic but now kinder Leah Clearwater, one summer when Forks and Sappho were seemingly being victimized by a suspicious strain of robberies. Hardly anybody in La Push owned a gun, so Sam had come up with the idea of giving every pistol in town to somebody willing to help the local cops work security at the borders. _The old Protector spirit isn't dead after all_, Jacob was thinking to himself as he lit one of the cheap cigars the police had given them in friendly gratitude, sitting against a back tire with Billy's shotgun straddled between his bent knees. _But of course the enforcement in Forks isn't ever any help, ever since Chief Swan..._

He let his mind go dead after that. He listened to Leah and Paul, who were sitting in the truck bed just behind him.

"I think it's funny that we're just supposed to stop whoever looks suspicious, like—"

"I know. If this crook is a woman, I bet we'll just wave her on through."

"If it's a woman and Sam's team gets her, we're screwed. You're the only one who can get really aggressive with women if you have to."

"I don't know about that..."

"What?"

"I'm just saying, if it got to the point where you were forced to turn into a gigantic dog, they'd be running away, not calling their lawyer."

"I don't know, it is La Push. If we _had_ a judge, he'd probably believe that shapeshifting abilities can be abused, you know?"

Leah laughed.

Smiling at this exchange, Embry stopped his slight pacing around the truck to sit down next to Jacob. He took off his glasses and rubbed them clean on his shirt. A little bit after he stopped phasing he'd become badly nearsighted and had to get some lenses put into some hand-me-down thick rims. They befitted the way he'd taken to blinking and anxiously twitching a little when he was bored; Jacob knew there was a longing to phase for the simple fun of it, the craving to feel the wind whip over the thousands of warm, wild hairs. There had always been a joke among the pack that being werewolves was the secret way Quileute men stayed on the wagon, but Jacob was the only one who had brought out a bottle from his top shelf.

And as tempting as it was, Jacob was the only one who had phased in the last ten years, and everybody knew why. Even after she'd left, he would shake into the teeth and the speed and he'd go looking for her every few weeks, which was turning later into every few months, only to find that the smell of the forest was just as empty as the drafty voicelessness in his head.

The other members hadn't exactly gone back to looking teenage before reaching their actual mid-twenties, but they'd quickly lost a lot of weight, and Quil in particular was so much skinnier than he'd ever been in the years before maturing into a werewolf that he'd been almost unrecognizable at first. As for Jacob, despite presently looking his actual age, there was a tired wisdom in his eyes that made him look slightly older than his friends. This was probably why he'd go out to eat with the guys and always get asked by some white bartender if he was somebody's older brother, probably why he managed with grown women in his desolate trailer bed on an occasional evening; one after another they'd be the type to smile and bite their lips when the wind teased through their open shirts and these were the only details he'd remember the following week. They would like him a lot, but never loved, and that was fair.

On this night Embry asked, as many of them sometimes did, if it got harder to phase, the longer "they" were gone.

Jacob did his usual shrug. "Depends on my mood, I think. Sometimes I end up giving up if I'm just too tired. But sometimes, like that night my boss pissed me off...it took off like gangbusters."

Embry gave a slight chuckle. "Probably wouldn't work as well for the rest of us. You were always so much better at controlling it..."

Jacob was swallowing a sip of gin with a dry smirk. He lightly asked, "What do you think, man...If I kept doing this, would I just live forever?"

Embry considered it with a shrug, and then proclaimed, "You can't keep a good dog down."

Leah overheard that, and with a mellow giggle she reached down and lightly shook Embry at the shoulder in a spirit of mirth. "Huh, what is that? _All Dogs Go To Heaven_?"

Paul then gave out a low sniggering in recognition of the phrase and they all started laughing in a spirit of self-mockery, even Jacob falling into a relaxed snicker and repeating it with a thoughtful look to the side. " 'All dogs go to heaven'," as if that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard.

The rest fell into their own joking rhythms while Jacob's attention scattered out to the navy horizon. It was on nights like these, when his blood was slow and his thoughts relaxed, that were actually the worst. Without the fierceness of spirit that a grudge requires, Jacob could not clutch in his mind why his simple pain had made him so furious, endlessly angry for years after she was gone.

On other days it just burned him into the worst, cruelest of moods. But on nights like this his heart crept out from the corner it had again and again been chastised into, and he just missed her, and that was all there was to it.

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The family spent half a week hunting in Greenland surrounded by the quiet chaos of constant white, leaving in their leisurely wakes splashes of red stains against the snow backdrop, only what was left of the blood cells clinging to the fur.

Bella and Rosalie headed up north as Edward and Emmett stuck to the eastern coast. The two sisters talked less and less these days, but they still hunted together, and that was at least something. Even more so than Edward, Rosalie seemed to regard Bella as something yet to come into action, as a possible impermanence. Sometimes Bella could feel Rosalie's eyes on her like she wasn't sure whether she was just going to pack up and vanish soon. She would sometimes rest her head on Rosalie's shoulder when they just happened to sit next to each other just to feel closer to the ground, like she had something to hold her from drifting away.

After Bella was neatly finished with her prey, she went to find Rosalie almost a mile away, next to an icy creek. She'd borrowed Jasper's expensive Nikon and was now wading into the shin-deep water to snap close-ups of a wiry tree glazed with shining frost. Bella did the idle favor of picking up her leather shoulder bag from where she'd left it several feet away. Until Rosalie was ready to run back there was an attempt to admire the colors of the sky as it became inked with seemingly unnatural colors, but it was a numb distraction from the peripheral. Maybe helped and not helped by the prowess and the complication of her inhuman mind, as her eyes focused forward on the high horizon she was really looking at the wolf.

Rosalie's flattened kill, a mass of dirtied white fur that seemed to Bella so pet-sized and with a hue likened to a doily. With its ferocity taken by the easy extraction of blood that had claimed its life some moments ago, there was simply no comparison. But still it reminded her of the face she'd left behind, the regretful bloodshed that punctuated those memories.

The weak supply of sunlight was fading, and with it the charged thrill of the hunt, and Rosalie came readily up to Bella's side. As they took up their fast but relaxed return, the sight was taken by her turned back. Bella still, in her mind, was looking at the animal, but as they walked away she imagined it a man.

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Jacob Black was 38, physically aged to almost 30, when in the stale dark of his kitchen he flipped on the light and realized he wasn't alone.

The smell was less potent to him now but still making him scowl. Quickly recognizing the white figure sitting calmly at his table, he growled, "Jesus, Cullen. What is this, a detective movie?"

Edward's eyes, deeply troubled, glared with immediate impatience. "...I didn't come here for your petty jibes."

Jacob's face slowly calmed and fell to a low dread. "Right. What do you want?"

There was a pause.

"Well. I was hoping..." Edward spoke flatly. "For your help."

After a few seconds Jacob began shifting with bottled anxiety. "What, did she send you here?"

"No." Edward sat there and fixed his eyes tensely on the tabletop, lips pressed firmly together. "Jacob, I am asking you to fix this. Because you, and she, and I all know...that I can't."

"You can't," Jacob repeated bitterly. He shook his head back and forth, furious and unbelieving, then barked, "How dare you. How _dare _you. You—_coward_—This should be in your hands if I could even—"

"Yes." Edward's voice was stiff, but became shakier as he went on. "You may call me a coward and it would be no consolation to either of us that it's true, that I have _nothing_ in me that can be used to force myself to destroy something that I have made my entire world. I think you would understand if you saw what she is becoming...She is...all this motion without any will—you don't see..."

Jacob gave him a look that made him stop. "I don't think we've been knowing the same Bella since it happened. And she hasn't seen me..."

"Precisely." Edward could see that his response was unexpected, and suddenly he seemed like he was pushing himself to say something he'd known for a long time and never uttered to anybody. "She loves you. I think you realize that. You don't seem to understand what exactly that means."

Jacob's jaw was tensing as the words gripped straight to his heart, the sound of them foreign and cold but his soul starving for them, pathetically crawling out for that fact that he had known, but hadn't known, having never been able to accept either thing as truth without giving up any hope of peace.

Edward's voice sounded thinned out, strangely weak and human. "She just wouldn't accept that when she was...alive...It was a complication she couldn't afford. But it has been immediately clear to her—to _all_ of us—from the moment she woke up from that dream she thought that this life was going to be. She has not forgotten you and she never can...She hasn't managed to separate the half of her—of her heart—that belongs to you. She could. But she won't. She thinks it would make her a monster."

Jacob turned away, wiping his hand over his face; the dim lamp on the counter behind him silhouetted his figure as both his arms went up, his head clutched in on himself...

"But that part of her that is you is going to die. You are going to die, and she can't recover from that; no more than I could change to recover from it, if _I_ was the one..."

"I wanted her..." Jacob intervened in a wooden voice that was low and small, "I wanted her to have some semblance of a life. That was why I chose for her to..." He didn't finish, but Edward understood.

"She could have that, if you promised to give her what she has on mortal terms," Edward said, somehow more gentle. "She could live until she's lived a life, she could finally _grieve_ without being afraid of eternal pain, with no more beating her own thoughts into the ground all the time."

Jacob leaned over his counter and just closed his eyes. Edward allowed him a private atmosphere by focusing out of his window, encompassing a perfect silence.

They were silent for many minutes, then finally Edward was standing and pushing the chair in under the kitchen table. Outside it was beginning to dawn with a low blue light.

Jacob tightly turned to face Edward again. His expression was grim and sour, but decided. When he finally spoke, it was with a piercing hatred that Edward could not resent.

"I will do this for her." Sharply, he added, "But you know that if I go straight to hell for this, she's going with me."

Even Jacob knew not to witness what Edward's face looked like after he told him that, and averted his eyes. It was a numb rivalry; he took nothing from hating him now, and he was even working on sympathizing, but he knew he'd really lose it if he saw what this pronunciation of the future was doing to the guy's head.

In a few jerky movements, Jacob moved to open the door of his fridge. With his voice still shaky, he said, "Please get out of my fucking kitchen."

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February in Norway was Alice's favorite, everything mildly thriving in rises of green outside the window of their holiday cottage on the coast of Bodo. As it got closer to summer there was an eerie compromise between the brightness in the sky and the crisp cold.

Rosalie seemed even to enjoy herself more openly than usual; she and Emmett would come back from long walks down the beach with chunks of ice showering from her hair, presumably from her husband's amused design. All of the Cullens would come in laughing from the cold to thaw the frost off their bodies, sometimes pairs hopping two at a time into a hot shower and then flicking back outside again for a quick hunt. All of them except Bella, almost constantly doted on by Edward as she sat drawing on a notepad at the kitchen table, even though her airs had livened significantly. Even in her sadness there was more motion and substance to her previously vacant eyes. As impossible as it was for her stamina to wane, she just seemed tired. There was no other way to describe it.

Back when there wasn't quite a family of Cullens, one of Carlisle's curious ongoing errands and one that occasionally gave Edward some cheer was to hunt for places that would have his favorite kind of snow. Rosalie had described it to Bella once, but having never seen any snow before coming to the floury blizzards of Forks, she of course hadn't experienced the rare phenomena.

When the forecast had predicted probably no more snowfall for the season, Bella was lying on her back next to Edward while they listened to the radio, and they heard the wind-tunneling mouth of the front door opening just before Alice whirled in trailing her hot pink scarf and happily declaring, "It's all glimmering outside."

Surprisingly, Edward left Bella's side and went ahead, probably not expecting her to join them when after five minutes she was the only family member still in the house. But some minutes after that she appeared at the front doorway, and several of the Cullens turned to watch her standing there with her soft snow boots on under her long sweater, some with a slightly guarded expectation. With her arms crossed she stepped almost timidly forward and off the front porch, her eyes scanning through the air like she wasn't sure what she was seeing.

The snow was the tiniest lightest little specks of ice, so small that out of the light they were practically invisible, like dust. But the most enchanting sight was where the sunlight, beaming down through the gaps in its indifference to the coming winter, ignited spotlights of thousands of glittering flecks; it seemed as if the snow itself, falling so slowly it hardly moved, was carrying the sun down between all the branches in glittery slivers candied with gold.

Bella stepped into the light to confirm her assumption that the sun wasn't blazing enough to make their skin look the same as the snow. For some reason that was what put her into a state of such freed awe: that it seemed then like even the world as it was within mortal reach held its own secrets, little things of a beauty rare even to an immortal family.

And then it was there, that pardoning thought. She was not going to live forever, and there was so much she still wanted to do.

A fraction of a moment and she was out closer to the beach right next to where Edward stood with his hands in his jacket; she pulled one out of its pocket and held it between both her hands.

Emmett had turned his car on so they could listen to the radio, and the first station they got to had a jazz number that Jasper started unconsciously swaying to with his arms around Alice's shoulders as he stood behind her. Bella and Edward slowly and automatically tilted into each other's arms, and danced.

Later she was lying back with her feet hanging off the bed as he pulled her boots off, causing a slight mist of the snow that had gotten in them. Her feet wriggled as if she could feel the blood returning to them. She said, "Come here."

He kissed her to the rhythm of her hips swaying up to his, removing her hair from a loose braid down her shoulder. In a pause between joined lips, the relaxed perfection of her face framed a pair of honey-amber eyes looking at him lovingly; her hands rubbed up his arms and shoulders and grasped him gently behind the neck.

"I want to stay here a bit longer." Her voice was tranquil. "We could see the midnight sun. I want to see it, when the sunlight never disappears. It's perfect for us here because it never gets too bright."

Edward let his thumb brush along her collarbone, maybe nodded slightly.

"And then I want to go back to Forks," Bella continued. "Just for a while."

"Alright," he softly replied after half a moment. His eyes locked into hers again, the meaning in that devoted expression deeper than before in these days. His constant disposition was longing, and it was now in a kind of hunger to leave his own body for the refuge of hers rather than simply be inside her that he said something they had always felt so little need to say, like he was the one who needed to feel it on his tongue. "I love you."

Bella used to consider what she had with Edward above the common weight of that phrase, that cliché in the movies that women watch on their Saturday nights; even when she'd had the impulse to say it, it had been a redundant declaration of a truth etched so thoroughly in them that seemed to thicken the very air. Now, from nowhere but within herself, she had arrived at a different place. If she saw some human couple hand-in-hand by the water she would wonder if they, perhaps one of very few, knew what that was like. She would have no doubt that it was whispered anyway, a declaration of something wonderful set in the ordinary, nothing more perfectly common than a pair of lovers coming in from the cold to warm each other's hearts with a single timeless murmer.

She whispered, "I love you too." She would tell him every single day.


	7. Six

Jacob awoke after the smell of her in his dreams, his senses following it to the foot of his bed, and then his body freezing to a calm attention of the figure blotting into his vision. She was sitting close to his legs looking pure and anciently still, like she belonged there as a statue lives in a cemetery, giving him the feeling that he'd been sleeping for years while she was sculpted there in the dark dust of his bedroom.

He knew that she could have appeared there only seconds ago. Even though he sat up in bed with drowsily silenced shock, her glance remained forward out the window to the right of his bed. Her appearance was smart and glamorous: she'd managed to style a slight wave to her glossy wisps of hair and wore a timelessly elegant coat along with fine gloves; like an unexpected cold wind, she moved to take them off.

He finally said, "Bella," with half a question mark on the end of it, because of course nothing about her had aged, but there still was something different.

She looked at him then and smiled like there was something about him she didn't expect, or like the sight of him saddened her less than she'd anticipated. In the dark her black clothing and pale skin painted the scene of a black and white movie, but with her smile there was a brilliant bronze tint in her eyes.

She said, "Hello." Clearly as water, without the slight wavering in her voice he'd always known her to have. For a moment they were both completely still. Then Jacob moved without really knowing what he was moving to do, nothing much more than his legs curling up under the blanket, and Bella smiled again, reacting like that action was an invitation; she slipped off her shoes and easily shimmied over Jacob's body to sit on his other side against the headboard. Seeming a little anxious, she smoothed her skirt over her tights. Looking at him now, she couldn't help marveling, "You've grown."

Jacob needed only one more second to adjust; he then grinned and said a matter-of-fact, "Yes." Bella chuckled, and a little more seriously, he simply replied, "You look...better."

"I am better," she admitted a little hesitantly. Then his name slipped into her next sentence like it had been clinging in her mouth for years, disarming the rest of her words into less solidity. "Though—Jacob, God, I missed you..."

He was still looking at her like she might be a dream, like he was waiting for the pinch. But he easily replied, "Of course you did."

With a reminiscent but somber expression she finally explained, "I needed to see if you were okay."

Jacob looked down at his hands, a couple fingers teasing a loose knot in the woven throw above his lap. "I'm always okay."

"Good to see you're living in a decent place now," she seemed to say as a weak consolation. But her tone lightened as she added, "You know, it took longer than I expected to figure out where you'd moved to, but I actually stumbled in on your workplace tonight. I needed some transmission fluid, and your name tag was hanging up by the door..."

Jacob gave an incredulous little scoff and then started to process that. " 'Stumbled in'? We aren't open very late..."

"No, you're not. I left a twenty tucked under the cash register. You might as well take it."

Jacob smiled crookedly. "I never exactly imagined myself doing oil changes all day. Then again, I don't know if I used to imagine myself doing anything in particular. It's decent money. You're not driving some American piece of shit, are you?"

Bella pressed her lips together, a little proud when she answered, "It's a '69 Mercedes-Benz. Drives like it was made yesterday."

Jacob's eyes widened approvingly. "SL series?"

She nodded.

"Got yourself a nice ride."

Bella bit her lip. "It's for you," she said.

Jacob looked more directly at Bella, his emotions more raw as the seconds passed. "Bells..."

"It's yours," she stated. "I really don't need it. There are getting to be too many cars in the family."

For a moment Jacob went very silent, and gave what he seemed to feel was a pathetically ineffectual response. "Thanks."

"I'm sorry..." Bella practically interrupted him, collapsing in nervous guilt. "You don't have to take it, if you hate that. It feels weird for me to give you something like that and maybe it's stupid for me to wake you up like this. It's just that I've known you a long time and never gotten you even a birthday present, so if you—"

"_Bella_," Jacob looked softly alarmed, not expecting such sudden vulnerability from her. He hesitated before taking her hand; she remembered the feel of it instantly and curled her fingers around the warmth, which was dimmer now but still a cozy bright-colored sensation to her cold skin. He said, measuringly, "I might as well be the one to bring it up before you freak out...I am still going to do it. I said I would. Whatever you're here to do, let's just...not go there."

Calmed now, Bella said, "You smell nicer."

After a second Jacob relished his nose into an upper section of her hair, an action that reminded Bella of how he used to rest his cheek upon her head.

"Yeah, you smell great," he agreed. "Still kind of sweeter than I'd prefer. But nice."

Bella closed her eyes and allowed her thoughts to relax for only a moment. Then she said, "If I was around all the time, though...You'd change again, wouldn't you?"

After a moment he sighed, "I guess so."

Something about the way he said it made Bella fully realize he sounded older than before. "Listen...If it's okay, I'm going to be checking up on you every once in a while. I need to." She slowly added, "I may not...come in, if you know what I mean."

She waited for an amount of devastation to settle into his features, but when his hand decidedly tightened around hers, she sensed that there was some sudden relief in having an actual certainty about her even as his body somewhat sighed out of it its previous elation.

"I'm sorry it has to be this way." Bella explained, "It will only get harder to live without you. You believe me when I tell you that?...In the end, I do need you. But what I think I need more is for you to live without me."

Jacob's face seemed slightly more grim then, like a certain thought had set a slight tightness in his mouth. After his silence was stretching into the sleepy hum of the wind outside, he admitted, "You don't want to know what I'm thinking right now."

With a fragile crack of a smile, Bella said, "I'm sure I do."

"It sounds to me," Jacob said guiltlessly, "like you've learned from his mistakes."

Bella's smile fell but not exactly to a frown. She said, "Edward" like readily clearing her throat to speak about him. "Edward can't be blamed for what happened to me."

"No, and I never said that," Jacob shook his head, his eyes clouding with distant recollection. "What happened to you...I couldn't help hating him for it, but I never blamed him. It was just what he was. Same way it made me sick being around you sometimes."

Bella closed her eyes for a moment.

"But it might be partly his fault you always felt all that guilt." After Jacob's voice quieted that to her, she bowed her head away from him slightly, and a light curtain of her hair shadowed half of her face. His tone intensified as he went on with a freshly renewed agitation, even as he seemed to be trying to suppress it. "Maybe this is just my take on things, but if you love somebody, and if they're about to walk out in front of a moving car..."

Bella's mouth opened, but he interrupted, "No, it's not like that at all, though, it's more like when you see that they're about to hit somebody. You—I mean, you yell, right? Sam's always told me that you'll realize more than ever how much you love somebody if it really messes you up when they do something really bad. And I know he wasn't okay with it and you had to argue and insist that it was your choice, which it was..."

He let things absorb for a second before feeling like he could go on.

"But he should've shook some sense into you; he should've told you exactly how everything was going to feel afterwards, and he didn't even yell. If I'd been him, I would've screamed at you. I might have been hard enough that you would've hated me. But to hurt even one person like that just to be with someone—especially if it had been me—it would've ruined you; you wouldn't even be the same person to me. And sometimes I could just swear to you that you were going to change your mind if you'd still gotten a choice, just cause I still look at you and see Bella. It doesn't have to have anything to do with how you felt about me; I just can't feel that you would've gone through with it. I don't believe it."

Bella let this all sink in with a calm clarity. Then she solidly admitted, "I do wish he'd told me more. We should've had more time to talk about what it would be like, but I wonder if it even occurred to him how easy I told myself it would be...In my mind, I was descending into a fairy tale, this...pure place where I could spend my life with him forever. But it was a dream. Living so long isn't any simpler. It just seems like it, and you have to trick yourself into not falling off the edge and ending up like the rest. I didn't understand how things can become so terrifyingly magnified, maybe because Edward couldn't even see that in himself. In a life like this, you can't just live for one person; there has to be other things. I keep wondering, if one of these creatures eventually took him away from me, would I be one of them, with nothing else to do but avenge him? What would be left of me?"

Even though the question was not meant to be answered, Jacob solemnly shook his head in a slight incredulous response.

After a moment Bella looked at him affectionately. "When you said that about being so sure that I was still me...I couldn't help thinking how much I needed to hear something like that a long time ago."

"I know," Jacob disclaimed. "I know. But all that came out of how furious I always was with you—_still_ was—for the sake of people like your dad because of what you'd wanted to do, and I wouldn't have dared to bring that up before."

Bella seemed to cringe a little.

"Sorry," Jacob immediately said. "Maybe it's still not right to..."

"That's not it. It's just that I was reminded..." Bella pressed her lips together, ran her fingers through her bangs. "Before I flew here, I was in Arizona looking in on my mother...She's been fighting cancer."

Jacob's face became earnest. "I was wondering if you'd found out."

She looked at him with a few surprised blinks. "How did you know?"

"I've actually been talking to Reneé for a while. Well, writing." In response to Bella's open curiosity, he explained, "It was shortly after you left...I just decided one day to look her up and write her a letter, since I was sure you'd mentioned me to her a couple times. I just thought, since we both knew things about you that the other didn't—though I obviously couldn't tell her most of the stuff I know—maybe it would make us both feel a little better. I didn't really expect to get a response, but she wrote me back within that week, and we've been in correspondence ever since. God knows what I've been filling up those pages with all this time. I'm terrible at writing letters."

"I'm sure you've improved by now," Bella assured him with a delicate laugh. "That's really...That's wonderful, Jacob. I don't even know what to say."

"Have you seen Dita?"

"Yes, and she's grown up to look a lot like me. Takes after Phil, though, considering she's into soccer and...things."

Smiling, Jacob considered for a second, and then turned to swing his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Bella watched him walk around the bed to her side before he held out his hand with a subdued inviting look. While perplexed, she took it and let him pull her up and off the bed.

Jacob bent just slightly to hit a button on his little boxy alarm clock, settling for what was currently playing on the cassette tape, then careened both their bodies into the wider space of the room, suggesting, "Want to take a break from talking for a while?"

"You're joking," Bella said with a laugh. "You were never much of the dancing type...unless that's changed."

He chuckled almost silently, as he pulled her in at the waist, holding one of her hands close to his chest. "Humor me. This is the last of any time we really get to spend together...and well, we never did this before."

She looked up at him sort of accusingly. "But we did."

His eyes were snickering. "Swaying in place is not dancing." And with that he eagerly tested her by slowly swinging her under his arm; she easily went with the motion in a smooth pirouette. It didn't quite fit with the music, an entrancingly moody but harder number than anything she and Edward would have ever danced to. Despite Jacob's remark, they found themselves in a woozy sway, Bella sampling different levels of closeness her sense of smell could tolerate until she finally rested her head against his chest, feeling the calming warmth of him through his undershirt.

After a moment Jacob made a monosyllabic chuckle, realizing, "We must look like an odd pair."

"You still look beautiful, Jacob," she said in a kind of reassuring grunt. She felt him beginning to laugh. "No, you do. You know what's funny is it's kind of fitting. Remember how we used to argue about how mentally old we were? You always came out at least twenty years ahead."

Jacob's breathing became slightly shuddered for half a moment. With his lips close in her hair, he muttered, "I can't believe you remember that." There was an edge of forever ago in his tone, like that memory lived in the farmost corner of even his mind.

"I've built up quite an inventory." Bella hesitated. "To be honest, I'm a little surprised that everything's still...kind of vivid for you. I was prepared for you to not really have any interest in talking to me. Or to at least think it wasn't a good idea."

"It's usually a terrible idea, honey," Jacob said at more of an affectionate whisper. "You're a little hard to forget. You know I'll be okay, though."

Bella shook her head like there was a thought she couldn't make sense of. "Will you?"

They'd stopped dancing.

Bella was looking him all over searchingly as she stammered, like the consolation she wanted was somewhere on his body, somewhere in the room. "If you can't live your own life, if you can't get _on_ with your life, I have no right asking...You'd tell me, wouldn't you, if you couldn't take it? I could just...I don't know what I'd do, but I'd do something else..."

Neither of them were capable of fully imagining her other options. The distant, unhinged look that came into Bella's eyes when she'd said that, the _something else_. It made Jacob's mind go to the reason she'd left him in the first place, ages ago. It wasn't the first time he'd scared himself by imagining that dark realm of possibility in which she might just get on a plane to Europe...

She was clutching at him slightly, anxiously looking him in the eyes. Jacob wondered right then: After all these years, was she still such a total fool?

Or did she know he was going to lie?

"I'll be fine," he muttered, his head rested above hers so that she didn't see his eyes. "I am fine."

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.

.

Later that night, if he had felt like being absurdly polite, he might have asked if she was expected back somewhere, tried to measure out on her means how much time they had. Instead he pulled on a jacket, remarking that it would be morning within the hour and that if they walked to the beach they could watch the sun rise. He then waited while she hesitantly but then rapidly put on her coat without buttoning it, not bothering with the gloves either. They'd come to an unspoken understanding between them since he'd woken up; he couldn't go so far as to accusingly insist that she owed him anything, but she wasn't about to deny him anything he wanted from her. Neither of them knew when the visit was going to end.

The walk down the road took up about half an hour and was downright surreal in its sudden feel of normalcy. The badly lit area had houses spaced so far apart it was hard to imagine a neighborly atmosphere, so Bella was a little surprised when a younger-middle-aged woman came carting a Vespa down the driveway, saw them and exclaimed, "Mr. Black? Where the hell have you been?"

"On vacation," Jacob offered with a smile. As they got closer he said, "Bella, this is Nadine. She...passes my house sometimes. Walking the dog."

The woman smiled and came forward to shake Bella's hand. When she got a close look at her piercingly pretty features, her hand faltered just a second longer than might have been normal. "You an old friend, Bella? I didn't think he had any that weren't men."

"Not really, I guess," Jacob muttered. "Just Bells."

It made Bella uncomfortable that Nadine looked so partly awestruck. She herself was quite pretty, with a deep and soft look in her dark eyes and the kind of olive skin tone Bella had always envied. When she and Jacob had finished their spell of small talk, the woman motored down the opposite direction, leaving the pair with half-awkward smiles.

"She's...cute," Bella volunteered.

"Sure, sure," Jacob agreed in a laugh. After his face straightened up, he gestured to the house they'd now passed, explaining. "Actually, she lives there with this other woman, I'm pretty sure they're together...The girlfriend makes these amazing glasswork sculptures that sell for about a thousand a pop. At least I think so, she's Czech or something, and I can hardly understand a damn thing she says..."

Bella laughed, suddenly brightened up rather than disoriented by the casual feel of their walk. Jacob was treating her like a good friend, a family member that comes around every couple years. She wanted to forget that as far as Jacob was concerned, she wouldn't be coming back. Not for a very long time.

She also knew this was the last time she could really see him, not through his window or from far off in the trees, with their association having any kind of semblance to its old rhythms. She looked down at Jacob's hand, and after a second reached out and held it. He gave her a warm look and gripped it eagerly.

The beach was textured with a mild wind and wasn't as rocky as theirs in La Push. Jacob commented on one of his few complaints: though the cliffs were pretty ideal for diving, the park district had made it illegal to do any of that several years ago. "A young girl drowned here a few years back," he added grimly. "I don't know if that had anything to do with it."

They were now approaching pretty close to the water, and the sky had a pretty electric blue hue. Bella kept her hand closed around Jacob's, tucking the other one into her pocket.

"Why did you leave?" she finally asked. "I never really imagined you would."

"It's not like I went very far." Jacob shrugged. "I needed to find work. It's nice to be able to support my dad. I'm not alone, though, I've got Embry. He moved in with his girlfriend out here before me, said his manager could use another mechanic..."

Bella, half-pleased, cocked an eyebrow. "And by 'girlfriend,' do you mean..."

"No, no..." Jacob was shaking his head with amusement. "He didn't imprint. The way those two make fun of each other, it's like the opposite of that. Thing is...Embry and I were the only guys that didn't imprint in the end, and we're the only ones that left. Even Seth, he met this _older_ woman four or five years ago...That was a first. And she moved in on the rez. Thing is, Quil isn't mad or anything that we left, and he comes down here whenever he feels like it, but sometimes I think he sees this rift between us that isn't even there."

Jacob's worrisome look immediately affected Bella; she rubbed her thumb against the back of his hand and said, "That'll get better."

He smiled faintly at her, then looked away before he awkwardly pressed on to a topic that had hardly ever been initiated by him. "What about everything with your...folks. I find it hard to imagine they all understand..."

Bella forced a smile in defense to the stinging rush. "For most of them, I think the best they can do is accept that they can't understand. And they don't try to talk me out of it. They know what that would do to me. Rosalie, though, she sort of...checks up on me. She asks me from day to day what I'm feeling about things, and the fact that she doesn't say anything back basically says...well." She tersely neglected finishing that thought.

A look from Jacob conveyed to her that he remembered the small amount of Rosalie's past Bella had explained to him in the mere handful of conversations they'd had about her life with the Cullens. Any elaboration on Bella's relationship with Rosalie had required some perspective on the bitter story of her transformation.

After a moment Bella's face started to fill with remorse; she winced her eyes shut briefly. "Rosalie...The way she is makes me feel so weak. I used to not believe how cold and reserved she can be, but...She literally feels all this pain every single day. It's never going away for her, and she just deals with it, year by year. And I have that pain—I hurt like something's burning me whenever I'm alone, and I start to understand why so many of our kind just go so sour and cruel, and I feel just horrifying that way...And I know I can't do it."

The sun was mostly up, bringing faint light through the occasional sprinkles of rainfall that had started while they'd stood there watching the sea; they were indifferent to their surroundings for the moment, isolated from their setting as well as completely alone on the drafty beach.

"But a few months ago?" Bella continued, her voice rising gradually to more distressed heights. "Most of us are sitting down watching a movie, and I'm suddenly reminded of something that makes me have this unbearable thought; my first reaction is that my face is going to show everything, and Edward can't see me like that, so I just tell everyone I'm going hunting and I run outside. A minute later Rosalie comes up behind me, asking what's going on. I tell her..." Bella faltered a couple seconds. "I told her something, this thing I remembered that's so horrible I couldn't bear for so long for anyone to know about it but me...How he made me choose where I wanted the pain to start. He threatened me with a slower death if I didn't—He made me practically _beg_ him to bite me, somewhere on my body, taking advantage of the fact that I knew how much it would hurt. He got it out of me pretty fast, and then he held me down and just _waited_, laughing at my horror, until just before..."

Jacob's hand had clenched tight around Bella's, shaking in a purely human, vulnerable rage, a small voiceless sound escaping him.

"I told her that what made me suddenly so anguished was realizing that they might have done a similar thing to my dad. And Rosalie thought about it for a moment and then she suddenly just said, 'I think you're making the right decision.' She told me she thinks I won't be able to get on like she did because I'll never be selfish enough. She even said the fact that I'd run out of the house instead of letting Edward share my pain was enough to prove this." Bella spoke more calmly now, her voice transitioning to a more distant tone. "It explains a lot about her, than she needed to be that way, that her mind just pushed her life away from her so that it would survive, and she hardly remembers anyone. She told me I'm too in-between, that I'm still living for things that are just going to be ghosts...It's too late to fix the way I think. The only way is this one thing, the most selfish thing I'll ever do."

At that last comment Bella had kind of automatically pulled her hand away from Jacob's and tucked it deep in her pocket. Jacob looked unsettled then, slipping out of his sandles and pacing slowly backwards toward the tide so that the thin rolling end of it licked smoothly past his heels. "You don't have to explain anything to me," he mumbled.

"I do, though," Bella protested, following him out to the shallow water. "I need you to know that it's not like I'm leaving you. It's practically the opposite. Maybe the best way I know how to balance things out in the end is to give him the life I have left...and just..."

Her voice trailed off, and Jacob's eyes were set with subdued flames as he now suddenly turned, took her by both wrists and pulled her closer in the water now reaching up to his knees. "I can handle it. Just say it."

She was caught off guard, and now her true hold on it in her mind, the euphemism, was knocked out of her. It left the sudden naked and impassioned edge to her voice when she let the truth breathe out of her more like an alarmed question than a statement: "I want to die with you."

After a slowly disarming pause, Jacob sighed, moving one hand more gently to the side of her head, but his face remained tensed by tremorous ghosts of thoughts.

"I'm living for you as much as for any of them, and it's not supposed to work that way," Bella admitted, her eyes fixed lovingly up and down him, even now newly gathering his grown features. "It will be hard enough when my mother passes, but after you're gone...I don't even want to know what that would be like."

A long silence passed between them as Jacob's features relaxed just slightly and he brought his hands down around her elbows, pulling and resting her arms up to his chest. The water billowed up Bella's coat so that the fabric was a rocking, deeply colored island around her except where her waist was poised against him. They could stand like this, even silently, for hours. But they both felt the draining push, that it was time to say whatever was left that needed to be said. They weren't sure if it was all something that could be spoken.

"Why couldn't you tell me anything like this before?" Jacob said almost at a whisper. "I had to hear it the first time from _him_."

She was somewhat speechless, then just sighed.

"Your man told me you loved me. _Edward_ did. You didn't. And I don't think you were denying it, I think you really knew most of the time."

"That's the thing," Bella confessed. "I had a pretty good skill for self-denial my whole life. But it kind of inverted when I was changed. You have to see things more clearly to manipulate people's perceptions of them...From the day I survived, I could keep anything from anybody, keep _them_ in the dark.

"But I could see everything in myself; it was all crystal-clear and undebatable, like a heavy bound book about my whole life, my whole mind. And you were in a lot more of the book than I'd realized, and I could no longer argue with myself because there it was. I loved you, and I _wanted_ you, once. But I was ashamed still. It wasn't my fault for the way I felt, of course, but still...Shame, it's just the story of my life."

They might have unconsciously waded out farther, or maybe the tide was rising, but it was swishing past their knees now, their clothes thinning heavily and sticking at their sides.

"You know what's strange," Jacob said. "I spent years being so bitter about how things turned out that year, when we became close so fast, thinking to myself that things shouldn't be this way because there shouldn't be any monsters, like I still didn't want it to be real. I just wanted to keep being a kid with a good-sized hole in my heart for a best girl friend because that was nice and complicated in a very regular way.

"But a long time ago, somewhere I got to thinking...how it would be if you were a wolf too. The way we used to mess around in the woods all day, we could do that forever. Maybe not what a vampire would call forever but enough of an eternity I could live with. It makes me kind of understand what you thought you were doing when you wanted to always be with him. I even wonder if you deceived yourself sometimes, with my ability to stop aging. I think it took you a while to realize we couldn't keep doing it until the world ended."

"_I_ could have, and would have." Bella's solemn tone indicated she'd given similar reflection. "But I didn't want you to. That too was a dream. And I'm so sorry—"

"You don't have anything to be sorry about," he interrupted, his distant tone muttering out to the horizon. "_Please_ keep telling yourself that. Loving somebody isn't a reason to be sorry. And I don't think you often acted on much of anything else."

Her gaze deepened and softened as he spoke. He reached and pushed some stray strands away from her cheekbone; his touch lingered.

"And I'm not sorry," he told her, his body shaking just a little, and sadly. Both his hands gently moved to her face, his thumbs brushing over the pale skin, and then travelled down her arms. He added with finality, "I'm not sorry about this."

She didn't stop him—How could she have stopped him?—He grabbed her just above the waist and hoisted her steadily up to him, clutching her body into his and kissing her softly and cautiously; their mouths were just slightly open and mostly unmoving and there was hardly any lust in it, more like a painting of a kiss than an actual kiss.

But her arms moved up, clutching around his shoulders; she was more than allowing it. What her senses wanted to memorize more than the joining of their lips was the feeling of surrender in her body from being lifted up against him, his one hand clutching now at the back of her neck and the slight tremble in his stomach she felt through the sopping fabric that seemed to mirror the tremulous but motionless feeling in her own body of so much sadness and happiness and longing and love sifting into her chest and joining into one invisible pulse, the memories conveniently and cruelly indexing themselves under the one phrase, _My Jacob_.

Some of his breath came fevered through her lips; the dormant creature she smelled in him gave her throat a raw tingle, but the burn seemed to fuel a low fury that only made her want to latch onto him closer. It seemed out of sensing this that he slowly, softly pulled his mouth away and just hugged her as closely as he could, rocking her in his arms a little.

After a minute he slowly set her feet back down in the sand, a motion through the water like plucking a floating angel to the ground. He placed one kiss on her forehead and said, "Love you." He closed his eyes just briefly, probably knowing that when he opened them she'd be gone.

It was still strange to her, how in the most brutal emotions she could feel like she was numbly sleepwalking through her path even when she was moving at lightning speed. She made her entire way back to Edward like a blind person grappling for a familiar hand.

Arriving at the hotel, she clenched her teeth with the effort of not walking through the lobby and upstairs any faster than was human; for a vampire it felt like the span of miles. She blankly greeted a guest at the bottom of the staircase just so he might hear her voice from their room. Finally, on the third floor, he met her flinging open the door as she came to it. She threw her arms around him with a small moan of relief, hardly looking at his face before she did so, but it didn't matter; they quickly let the door shut behind them, their motions winding tangled into an inhuman acrobatic fervor before they heard the short slam, Bella pulling Edward around her like she wanted him to crush her into sawdust. A lamp was knocked to the wall and cracked its miniature sound of wreckage as their bodies slipped and locked, just clutching tighter and tighter and tighter in a cradling embrace on the bed. They did not fill her newly quaked chasms; they flung themselves bravely to the bottom, together.

She wasn't sorry.


	8. Seven

On the morning after that night in the hotel, Bella and Edward had gone hunting together in a baited silence. Afterwards they'd sat still at the base of a bald wintered tree, Edward cradling Bella into the crook of his shoulder. She'd spoken sort of robotically in a voice painted with simple wisdom, words like brush strokes coming up from her voice and painting the eventual recollection a vivid inescapable crimson, leafing the trees with summer oranges and reds as the moment became woven into the passage of time. Words translated right from her delicate consciousness, a ticker-tape line of sentences to give him these moments' glimpses straight into her mind, wrapping and binding him to a promise.

_Promise me you won't leave the rest. I know that after this happens you'll want to disappear for a while. You'll think the only way to fix the pain is to run far away from anything you've ever known and start all over again. But after I'm gone no one except for them will ever truly know you. No one else new ever will again. Please. Tell yourself that they are what is left of me, and you'll make it. And live long enough that I am only a light winking somewhere in a crowded sky. Please. _

This wasn't a single conversation that they'd had; this wasn't something she'd said aloud in a single string. But thirty-five years later, when Bella felt like she'd been muttering mere fragments and repetitions of these words to Edward in a frantic insistence, descending through decades, the end of their story took these urgent sentiments and placed the puzzle pieces together, melded them into understanding. Bella had known for many years now that she was asking Edward to do something that, by all knowledge that either of them had, he simply could not do.

_Long enough for the universe to conjure through its own impossibilities, to birth new galaxies from accidents, for you to both remember and forget me, to carry me with you as only a memory of a memory of a moment. It will be like I wasn't even here, like I was something that ignited so briefly it was barely there but created something in you, new lines of endless determination in a future you must write for yourself. But written with them. _

_With your family. Without me._

People walking down an aisle to look at a body that used to be a being that used to be their breath; they can't do that either. They do it anyway, somebody does, every single day. All those miserable miracles she had told herself were out there were Bella on the day that she really understood. The goodbyes were so impossible that even as they happened they couldn't happen; her body was elsewhere. It resisted. In her entire vampire lifetime she had never needed so fully to deceive herself. She couldn't.

The entire Cullen family was at an airport in Belfast. Bella was the only one with a ticket. This seemed the best way: to send her up to the calm skies like the beginning of a vacation; practically the only thing none of them could do was fly after her. Not enough time to swim or run after, and the awful muting of a public place would be the bitter setting of the last words. Her flight was boarding in ten minutes; the family had loosely arranged itself in a kind of line she had to walk along. She did so as she needed, not even realizing how the group, drawing enough attention with their collective impact of beauty, drew the curious stares of many who walked by with the very solemn sight of how they seemed knotted together in thick suffering.

First, Esme, who kept running her fingers through Bella's hair, her attempts at forming any thoughts into words coming out as whimpers, eventually dropping her grasp to the hands or sleeves of her husband, who said his very small-sounding words, gently against Bella's left temple, so that Esme didn't have to try any harder. Before she gave him a final embrace, he assured her, in the most labored sincerity, that he had already forgiven her.

"So long, baby, I'll never forget you": Emmett was one of the few who actually managed to smile, even though he looked so unusually troubled it immediately threatened Bella's resolve. He detected that, watching her bite down on her lip as she met his eyes in building anguish, and quickly responded by pulling her to him and hugging her in a rocking, tight embrace. When Bella was finally somehow freed from her brother by both of them, she turned to Rosalie.

A distant bystander would have probably been puzzled by the seemingly heartless tall blond who had stood looking inattentive, almost bored, as Emmett and Bella said goodbye. When Bella turned to her, she took to an almost aloof air, just barely bothering a big-sisterly touch on Bella's shoulders and then a straightening of the collar on her jacket.

Rosalie sort of cleared her throat and then just asked, "How do you feel?"

The final question, simple enough. Bella opened her mouth a little before finally allowing, "I feel old."

"Yes." Rosalie shifted. "You...You lived well." She crossed her arms and let Emmett lightly hold her from the side. She didn't seem to want Bella to really touch her. Bella reached and quickly squeezed one of her hands. She left it at that.

Alice, looking like she was choking on something, only managed to start by reaching up to pinch some lint off of Bella's hat, and then grimace at it, remarking, "Really, are you trying to _look_ like an eighty-year-old?"

The shortest laugh escaped Bella before she quickly squeezed Alice into her arms as if it was the only thing that could momentarily keep her from breaking down. Alice always felt so small and childlike in such a close embrace; Bella's guilt grabbed menacingly in her gut and she moaned a small pained "I love you."

A sad sigh was returned, along with, "Love you too, honey." By the time she was released from Bella's frantic grasp, she had been calmed into a lachrymose-seeming subdued gloom. While it simply wasn't possible for Alice's husband to keep everyone comforted, the majority of his talent was being spent on her.

Jasper was a heavy truth of a body, the collected wounds marking his face, some his and some not his. Somehow he was the worst so far to behold, as Bella realized with a sense of morose exhaustion just now, how hard it must have been for him to live with this, live with her and what she'd spliced sorely into the emotional core of his family and the new grief that would now be his constant neighbor. But he managed even to put on a gentlemanly smile, take her hand and kiss it on the knuckle. She embraced him with a miserable whisper of, "I'm sorry, Jasper..."

"Bella. Shh." He held her in a very brief, brotherly tenderness; but before she broke away, his voice, cutting itself apart with quiet repressed misery and truer than any other sound, suddenly said in her ear like a secret: "We love you."

She closed her eyes into his shoulder before it seemed so profoundly that there was nothing around her, nothing in her arms. The family took themselves to the side, crowded themselves away looking through the massive glass window out at the slow and stopped planes. In the noiseless pocket of the smoothly bustling airport, it was now only Bella with Edward.

For a long moment they stood without touching each other, gazing piercing in joined unison at each other's faces, still. In both their minds, their history was retold, arriving at simple, happy things, the lifetime ago when he first felt the warmth of her skin; they filled the torn spaces with a blinding innocence, a forgotten feeling of youth, for they had now, both of them, began to feel so much older.

There were places in time now that Bella could not remember, a realization that usually gave her a pain in her heart, but was now benign. The memories she had were white-hot with a very painful beauty, blazing and scattering along her body as Edward finally reached out a hand and let his fingers caress a strand of her hair hanging from her hat. She reached up and slipped it off her head. He stepped forward into her and placed his lips atop her hair, slowly. Slowly, she held him at his waist and he tilted her face symmetrically and then bending to his: They kissed. They kissed forever, etching themselves joined into the space so that the separation was slow enough to seem unreal. Edward left her skin with a self-resistant final grasp on her shoulders, which he somehow, somehow let go of.

The entire goodbye was wordless. All of her thoughts and confessions were outside of her, and she had become these others, everyone she left behind.

_Do not imagine me as gone. Imagine me in a different order, the fragments out of sequence. _Ex vivo_, I go. Wait for the world to scatter and churn the atoms into its own infinite dust, and in its manifestation of the impossible, the inevitable, wait. Wait for the awful and glorious sequence to unfold my self to you a second time. Or don't. Or die. But do not leave what is left of me._

_Please._

On the plane it was very quiet. She sat appearing very listless, looking across the aisle to where a man sat with his daughter. He was affectionately twisting at the girl's pale blond locks as she looked at a coloring book. He noticed her tired-looking glances that seemed an appreciative longing directed at the girl; Bella made sure to smile, and he smiled back.

She tried to wallpaper her thoughts with the little girl's affectionate chattering even when the appearance of her leaning back and closing her eyes made the father reduce their talking to candid whispering. In a way quite opposite to her old remembering meditation, she attempted with every strength of her thoughts to steer herself away from everything she'd just left.

She was afraid. Despite the feeling of exhaustion wearing on her heart, her body lived and wanted with still immortal vigor, and part of it did still instinctively clutch to its strange version of life; she had gained back the desire for being when she was promised this day was going to come. And maybe there was no human sense in it at all, in the equivalent of getting on a plane one already knew would crash and burn and rip into pieces, but that was also why it was right. She imagined, if this plane were to actually crash: leaving devastation, torn and burned bodies floating in a pool of oil and water; and herself, still alive among the bloody ruin. And then it happening to her ten times more. That, she knew, was a future more horrifying than the darkest afterlives.

"Do you want me to finish the story tomorrow?"

The girl across the aisle was falling asleep. Still blind under her closed lids, Bella picked up a squeeky yawn in her ears.

The father chuckled a deep hum of affection. "Okay, goodnight, Lily. I love you, honey."

"Goodnight, Daddy."

She carried those words with her after they landed, her mind going comatose with its hold on every shred of warmth she could muster into feeling. The airport found her facing close to the window watching the planes roam on their wheels, just like where she'd left her family, with her body still as a mannequin and her eyes closed. After a moment she felt as if she could not do it on her own much longer, she would lose it, she'd suffocate.

Then at her side, a warm hand closed around hers.

She smiled.


	9. Kalaloch

_36 hours ago, Kalaloch, Washington_

_._

The scrap of paper is scribbled with a trembling scrawl, "Bowerman airport—10 pm," on the back, or the front, depending on which way you hold it. The other side anyhow, reads in thicker marker, "FOR SALE."

The woman must be pretty determined because she plucks it up from the windshield and is holding it in her hand when she comes knocking. He flinches when the noise gets him off the couch, ends up taking a moment to gather why exactly she's there.

"Hi," she greets quickly when he opens the front door. "I saw your ad about the Mercedes. Thought I'd come take a look at it?"

His screen door jams and wobbles noisily before he gets out of his threshold and then out onto the porch. "You saw the ad, huh?" His tone suggests he doesn't actually know what she's talking about. She just nods, and when Jacob sort of unconsciously starts heading down the driveway to where the SL is parked, she follows with her hands in her pockets.

"She's looking really good, I have to say," the woman says. "You might be asking for too little, really—Other people are gonna try to negotiate you out of your asking price, but...well, I've really been looking for one of these."

Jacob isn't really sure what he's doing, brushing some of the year's early snow off the front windshield of the still pristine-looking Benz, checking over it with his bottom lip in his mouth. He looks up finally and shoves his hands in his pockets, kicking some ice underfoot as he walks more purposefully back over to the woman with a grimace on his face.

"I'm sorry," he confesses. "I can't sell you that car."

"Are you kidding me?" the woman protests weakly. "You put in the ad...Look, I drove forty miles to look at it..."

Jacob smirks nervously, looking more directly at her now. "Alright, listen...What's your name?"

She's lively-looking, he figures single since she came in a pick-up truck with no one else in it and people rarely go to look at cars by themselves, much less _this_ kind of car. She doesn't look quite fifty, which means she's less than a decade younger than Jacob looks. Which he feels slightly uncomfortable for even contemplating, but...

She flatly offers her name: "It's Saffron, Saffron Carter."

"No kidding?" The corner of his mouth curls up. "Your name is Saffron?"

"Yeah." She rolls her eyes a little. "I go by Sadie sometimes, so if you can't say that with a straight face..."

"Okay, Sadie, then."

He's starting to think that if he was going to sell the car, she'd be the perfect person to sell it to. He's wondering if she's a natural blonde.

"I tell you what...There's a decent restaurant a few miles west. I could buy you a nice big steak to make it up to you?" He shifts a glance to his feet and back up again before saying, "I could even...make it worth the drive, if you'd like."

She tilts her head, not exactly in a negatively scrutinizing way. "I don't even remember your name, and you're asking me for a date."

He just shrugs. "It's not my fault my name is a little more common than 'Saffron'."

She's looking him up and down quite properly now; he's cautiously optimistic that he's in just before she gives a little satisfied smile. "Let me get my purse, okay?"

She's excited about the car, alright, and in the mere four-minute drive to the River Lodge he's able to gather she knows a thing or two about classics. He's already invented a biography for her in his head: She's attractive, so "divorced" goes without saying. Father probably owned a successful business selling farm equipment; she became a salesperson for many years before being promoted as a CEO somewhere, recently quit to move to a less urban setting and needs a zippy little car to prove how much she means it. It's one of the better stories he's made up for a woman he's met that he doesn't really plan on getting to know, which means in a strange way that he really quite likes her. He even asks her enough questions to start proving him wrong by the time they're in the parking lot.

But he still does all the motions with only half the meaning, and she catches on, probably assumes she's in for a one-night stand and doesn't appear to mind. It's no difference what she thinks about his reasons for not being a good whole piece of gentleman, because the end result is probably the same.

They sit at the bar in the restaurant and she orders the least expensive steak. Shortly after they've sat down, Jacob reaches to take a book of matches from a little basket sitting by the tip glass.

It's the kind of quiet place where you hear every little thunk of a beer bottle being set down; she's half-done with her Heineken when she casts him a look that makes him realize he's become very quiet.

"So, Mr. Black," she says, having made a joke of pulling her newspaper page back out to double-check his name. "What's your deal?"

"What's my deal?" Jacob has been idly sitting forward and turning the matches over in his hand.

"What makes a guy put a car on the market and suddenly change his mind?"

"Oh. Well..." He sighs, milling it over in his mind. "A friend of mine gave me that car, actually."

"Ah."

He rests his chin on his hand, staring off at where the bartender is mixing a martini. He finally mutters, "Tomorrow is the last time I'm ever going to see her."

Sadie frowns in mild sympathy. "Where is she going?"

"Oh..." Jacob gives a sigh, a shrug, and he slips the matches into the front pocket of his jacket. "Off to her family, I guess."

His voice is distant and almost flat, and the woman next to him parrots his thoughftul posture, looking his face up and down with a sort of pleased confusion. "I'm beginning to think you're a very unusual man, Jacob Black."

Jacob chuckles. "No...Not really."

It's easy enough, but for now, it isn't really true for him. He will enjoy his date with Saffron Carter. And later tonight, maybe, she'll go home with him, but it'll all be held at arm's length by some arm that isn't his, a hazy loosening of the senses that has pulled suffocation over his life ever since he told that lie that was yes, I can do this, I am going to be alright. To this day, he can't say whether it's true. He doesn't know if he should sell the car. He can't tell which of the notions is thinner, whether his life is going to end tomorrow, or if maybe he's going to finally be able to start living.

A short time before Billy died, he mentioned to his son how many native cultures consider drowning to be the worst possible death, that it leaves its victim trapped in a kind of limbo, that it does not allow others the right chance to say goodbye. In his dreams, in his daydreams, in his lucid thoughts he sees himself plunging into the depths after Bella, a mile's struggle to the ocean floor, and not even to save her, not this time. He feels the stifling pain in his lungs and his muscles and his skin: all of this to sever the stubborn relationship of her indestructible body with itself, to separate the atoms into dust, he washes her into the world, he sets her free. This is what he tells himself, every night and every day, because his life is another thing but it is always there, this thing he has to do.

He knows that he will do it because he has done it before. It would not be the first or even the second time that his actions have defined the question of her existence; his place in her life is the same as it has ever been, to save it but never to hold it in his hands.

He remembers her as just a delicate girl in a pair of loose jeans, walking tightlipped on the beach in that hidden composure like she wanted always to just melt into the sand, and he wonders time and again if he was a teenage boy falling forever in love with a death wish. Whether he rescues her cold and choking body so that she can live to walk right into the arms of death, whether he rips her from the throes of such a monster into the half-life, she yearns always for another existence, the next existence. This is why he thinks sometimes that it can't be the end, because this is him and Bella, forever and always.

On and on, she breaks. He fixes. He gives her back.


End file.
